In this week’s edition of Africa’s Most Innovative Companies, Abiola Olaniran Elijah introduces African gaming-app company Gamsole, a vibrant young company bringing the real African experience to the world through its fun and innovative games.
While a number of other entities – including Google, Apple, and Windows – also develop and provide online gaming opportunities for customers, Gamsole really stands out in the gaming market through its use of African imagery and concepts in its games.
Founder of Gamsole – and award-winning game developer – Abiola explains: “Our content is so unique and so new in the gaming world. We’ve brought out the real African everyday experience, have refined it a little bit and have transformed it into engaging fun experience on mobile phones.”
He adds: “We are bringing out the real African experience into awesome digital graphics, that’s also unique and innovative.”
Profusely proud of Africa and her natural beauty, the Gamsole team want to share Africa’s beauty, stories, culture and society with the world, hence the choice to sculpt new games around African concepts in a bid to re-create the ultimate “African experience”.
“Africa is rich in many beautiful, engaging, fun stories and events. Africa is also very rich in art. We have a team of perhaps the best digital graphics designers who understand Africa. The concept behind it is that we have seen an opportunity where people can have fun playing these games…Since our game concepts are based on the everyday activities of Africans, we make sure that every other arts in our games are things Africans can relate with,” explains Abiola.
Speaking as to the added value Gamsole brings to the intensely competitive gaming market, Abiola says: “We provide fun-filled multiplayer gaming experience to our customers who are using these smart devices. Our customers can now play our games which are garnished in refined African concepts and experience with other people around the world through their smart mobile devices. It’s a totally new experience and we are glad to know that people around the world love the experience and are downloading it from the app stores/ marketplace at a fair price.”
The gaming app developer is enjoying a good take up of its products, recording stable revenues in particular through the Windows phone marketplace. The games created by Gamsole really are for a global audience, with Abiola noting: “African residents love it and … the rest of the world even seems to love it more.”
The hard work is not over, however, with the team revealing high ambitions for their products which they promise they will continuously expand with new games and new stages and levels to existing games: “We see Gamsole becoming a great entertainment force in Africa and also a way of exporting African art to the rest of the world.”
Having just finished working on a game called Kazoo – which offers users the opportunity to play in English, Swahili, Yorubu, Igbo and other languages – Abiola hints that the team is hard at work developing an exciting new car racing game which takes players around multiple African cities; TrafficMadness.
As developing continues, Gamsole is enjoying strong growth with the team projecting that the company will have amassed 8 million followers on android and iOS platforms by the end of 2013.
So, with such a seemingly flawless record of growth and success, what challenges has Gamsole faced since its inception?
“Number one is funds, there’s not much funding for technology businesses in Africa. Then we need more infrastructure like high speed internet. In Africa, we have the human capital and the market is huge,” Abiola says.
For budding entrepreneurs, the Gamsole team have only one message: “Start out early, pursue your dreams, network and meet people and persevere.”
