Kwalee recently teamed up with Saudi Arabia-based Fahy Studios with the support of Neom Media to beef up gaming in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).
Fahy Studios is a new game studio based in Riyadh, and it is using Hitseeker, Kwalee’s mobile publishing platform which has a new Arabic version coming soon to support MENA developers. This agreement will see Kwalee publish Fahy Studios’ future mobile games to a worldwide audience.
It’s an interesting partnership because it’s still rare to see Saudi studios work with Western game companies. It also offers a glimpse into how the Middle East hopes to grow its gaming business a lot faster than other countries have done.
The Saudis are the richest royal family in the world, and they want to build a financial empire in games. But they also want to create jobs in the kingdom itself in order to offset the loss of oil-related jobs over time. That’s why the Saudi Public Investment Fund has pledged to invest $37 billion in games. And it’s courting companies like Sega and Capcom in Japan to bring jobs to Riyadh. Kwalee has noticed this and it wants to join in the opportunities.
The Esports World Cup has a $60 million prize pool and it’s drawing more people to Saudi Arabia this summer, and it’s another arm of the strategy where Saudi Arabia is trying to support the game business. The question is whether such events can temper the fears in the region and overcome inertia of the past.
Kwalee was founded in the United Kingdom by David Darling, who was the founder of Codemasters. He sold the company to Electronic Arts for $1.3 billion and then Darling, who was knighted by the queen, founded Kwalee. The company is 12 years old now and it is focused on hybrid casual games, as Darling believed that mobile games would grow rapidly.
Kwalee focused on sticky games with addictive core loops and monetization via ads. That grew into a hypercasual games business with 1.5 billion installs across 100 games, said John Wright, vice president of mobile publishing at Kwalee, in an interview with GamesBeat.
Now it has grown to 400 people. But the company pivoted to hybrid casual games, which have longer gameplay cycles, because of the push by Apple to emphasize privacy over targeted ads. The company viewed that as an “apocalypse” for hypercasual games.
Now Kwalee is working with internal teams as well as third-party developers, and Fahy Studios is one of the external game studios Kwalee is working with. Wright said Fahy Studios is working on hybrid casual games, with a focus on games that work for both MENA and the world.
Kwalee moved into hypercasual games as a publisher, but it saw that the sector was going to be hit hard by Apple’s push for privacy over targeted ads, and it moved back into hybrid casual games, which are casual games with longer playing times. The company recently invested in a 3% stake in Devolver Digital, and it is also focused on the MENA region.
“My hypothesis is that, in the next one to two years, companies like Fahy Studios will start to make games that are going to be at the top of the charts,” said Wright. “That is why Kwalee is supporting them and investing in them.”
He added, “We’re also about to launch our publishing portal in Arabic. And it’s going to be the first publishing portal in the world that is supported in Arabic.”