The golden opportunity in Egypt is its talent pool

Pocket Gamer Connects Jordan returns on November 9th and 10th, 2024, offering you a chance to gain insights into the world’s fastest-growing games market, MENA.

As part of our MENA coverage and run-up to the event, we caught up with 2024 Studios co-founder Ahmed Najeeb to discuss what the team is up to and the opportunities and challenges facing the games industry in Egypt.

Najeeb also shared with us the studio’s plans to increase its development pace and how it gives back to the community through teaching intermediate and advanced courses to support up-and-coming talent in the region.

PocketGamer.biz: Tell us a bit about 2024 Studios and what you’re up to right now?

Ahmed Najeeb: 2024 Studios is a game studio based in Egypt founded by passion-driven gamers who were bound to study game development in the same lab number 2024.

After graduating in 2014 and winning a global rank in Microsoft’s Imagine Cup, myself, Walid, Mohi and others decided to start our own studio to build games with a vision that we’d be proud of.

Together we poured our blood, sweat and tears after our daily jobs and on weekends until we managed to take our first leap of faith by turning 2024 Studios into our full-time jobs and accepting lots of compromises. However, it was totally worth it and if we could rewind time itself, we’d do it all over again in the blink of an eye.

2024 Studios operates on three main axis:

For nine years our main focus was educational games provided to clients across the globe. We’ve produced and released over 15 titles on various platforms including mobile, PC and Linux.

Our dream projects target bigger scopes that don’t fit the mobile platform. We’re currently working on a puzzle platformer in a dystopian setting.

We’ve also been co-organising an annual event since 2015 called Run Double Jump. RDJ has gained a great reputation among indies.

Finally, we never back down from providing industry awareness sessions/talks in events in Egypt, and provide mentorship to teams who need it.

How many staff do you currently employ and where are they based?

Right now the team consists of 15 team members including full-timers and freelancers. They’re all based in Egypt but in different governorates, since we adopt a remote working setup.

What are you doing to foster collaboration and recruit local talents?

Engaging in teaching helps a lot with that matter. We spot the talents in our students and we monitor their graduation projects closesly. Plus we try to be as active as possible in the game development community in Egypt so we’re always aware of the latest updates, talents, and provide help whenever we can.

Our team gives back to the community through teaching intermediate/advanced courses at the Information Technology Institute, the academy that we initially graduated from.

The courses we teach include Game Design, Level Design, Animaion in Unity and Networking for Multiplayer Games.

You’ve developed games for PC, iOS, and Android. How do you decide which platform to target for a new game?

For work-for-hire projects, that’s usually decided by the clients since they always have the decision clarified in the RFP [Request for Proposal]. If not, we help them decide the platform by acquiring informaiton about the target segment and the scope of work. For instance, if it’s an educational game that targets an age group of six-10 year olds, then mobile would be a more accessible platform.

As for our games, we try to target higher visual fidelity and longer gameplay sessions, genres that aren’t as popular in the mobile platform. So we find PC, and hopefully consoles one day, a more suitable platform.

Can you take us through your publishing strategy and how your games have been received internationally outside the MENA region?

For work-for-hire projects, we handle the scope of work until it goes live on the clients’ store accounts. The marketing process is usually handled by the clients themselves.

Regarding our game, we’re almost done with a vertical slice to use in our pitch. We’ve created a list of well renowned publishers which have portfolios that our game can fit in. Once we have the pitch prepared, we’ll start approaching these publishers and take it from there with the responses we get.

What are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced in the localisation process, and how have you ensured a culturally relevant experience for players?

Mostly the biggest challenge in localisation is that there’s no text solution that works well with Arabic characters out of the box. Throughout the different projects we’ve worked on, we’ve been asked to feature both Arabic and English languages in the game, so we used plugins available to customise our own solution to handle all the characters.

Building upon this solution, we even extended the dialogue system we’ve been using to support Arabic text, as well as adding localised voice-over support.

To ensure cultural relevance, we’ve worked closely with instructional designers who help us a lot in validating the scripts we write for our games.

With one client we even utilised an online tool that ranks the text and validates it against a specific target age to ensure that it would be easy to digest.

Africa has a vast number of mobile users. What do you think is the key to tapping into this audience? And why do you think some still overlook the market despite its growth potential?

I believe the key to tapping into any specific audience is to address their interests/culture through the game. The more a player can relate to a game, the more they will be engaged with and hooked by it.

Once a player feels that a game is built specifically for them and that their feedback is heard and appreciated, that’s when you get their loyalty to your title.

In terms of funding and support for gaming studios in MENA, what has been your experience navigating the funding landscape?

We’ve had no experience raising funds or seeking support from investors in the MENA region.

What do you see as the current opportunities and challenges facing the games industry in Egypt and the wider MENA region?

The golden opportunity in Egypt is its talent pool. The aspiring developers, artists and designers here are full of passion and are truly willing to go beyond their limits if given a suitable environment.

As for challenges, we’re doing a great job progressing and educating ourselves on the technical aspects, but we’re so behind on the business of games. Developers and studios know so little about the business of video games. Even worse, investors know nothing.

The industry in Egypt is still young. This introduced a very hard challenge in finding/recruiting seniors in any department, leading to a lot of talent having to leave the country to join studios in Europe.

What are your plans for the rest of 2024? Will you be exploring new platforms? And are there any specific initiatives or projects on the horizon that we should look forward to?

We hope to have a publishing deal by the end of Q3 (fingers crossed). Once we have that, we’ll go full sail and expand the team to increase the pace of development.

I’m also working on a side project, a documentary highlighting over 10 Egyptian studios and indie developers.