When you think of games you think kids, but the business of gaming is a far cry from child’s play. The average reader would not be surprised to know that this is a multi-billion dollar industry globally. What might be surprising to most, however, is that Pakistan’s gaming industry is surprisingly vibrant and reportedly has an annual average revenue of $25 million.
What makes that number pop even more is that a few years ago, that figure might have been close to zero. The first local game-production houses were set-up in Pakistan around 2005. In the nearly two decades that have passed since then, the industry has grown from an initial three players to just over 60 major game developers. Include smaller setups and you have an industry with at least a few hundred competitors.
As demand for the games rises, particularly post-pandemic, the industry is expanding. The local industry employs around 15000 creatives and engineers, and going by the number of job openings on the companies’ websites and LinkedIn, they are always hungry for more. To cater to this demand, universities have started offering degree programmes and specialisations in game development and design.
Game makers in Pakistan typically produce games for a global audience. Most of the games are published by international game giants like Entertainment Arts (EA) Inc., Ubisoft, and Supersonic Softwares. This means that potentially Pakistan has access to a $ 90 billion mobile gaming industry. We talk about the mobile gaming sector separately because it is huge, but also because the local industry currently specialises in mobile gaming applications. However, the mobile gaming sector is part of a much larger video game industry which is valued at $ 200 billion. That is more than what the global film and music industries make combined.
The industry also includes e-sports champions who make the news for earning game winnings that amount to more than what an average graduate of the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) will ever make in his or her life. Click on the e-sports earning live leaderboard for Pakistan and you will see that the local champion, Sumail Hassan has made close to $ 4 million dollars by playing a single game, Dota 2, an online multiplayer game where teams fight against each other to defend a battle tower.
Game development, the next big thing for investors and VCs?
“I was very surprised to see that a leading and prominent investor was expressing interest in game development,” says Muhammad Hilal, CEO of Peshawar-based Aptechmedia. In an interview with Profit he said that the investor cited a figure of $ 260 million as the amount Pakistani consumers have spent on video games through e-commerce (this is the combined expenditure by Pakistanis on games and game systems produced worldwide) in 2020. This was a 53.3% increase in expenditure on games from the previous year. The content in this publication is expensive to produce. But unlike other journalistic outfits, business publications have to cover the very organizations that directly give them advertisements. Hence, this large source of revenue, which is the lifeblood of other media houses, is severely compromised on account of Profit’s no-compromise policy when it comes to our reporting. No wonder, Profit has lost multiple ad deals, worth tens of millions of rupees, due to stories that held big businesses to account. Hence, for our work to continue unfettered, it must be supported by discerning readers who know the value of quality business journalism, not just for the economy but for the society as a whole.To read the full article, subscribe and support independent business journalism in Pakistan
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