Will this be Nigeria’s
gaming moment?

One of the more interesting things to emerge from Nigerian timelines in the past few weeks has been the enthusiasm for games that are immediately familiar. Lagos Run (also referred to as Danfo Run) puts a yellow bus on the screen, Lagos Life creates a version of life in the city, and Monkey Post returns to the small pitch and tiny goalposts of street football. People recognise the setting before they have learnt the controls. It is an interesting kind of recognition, seeing something that is usually part of your ordinary life become a world that other people want to enter. [1]

There is a temptation to look at all of this and conclude that Nigeria has finally discovered how to make games. The more interesting question, to my mind, is why we have had to make this discovery more than once.

We have been here before. There were developers building games around danfos long before the current AI models existed. There were studios attracting international attention, announcing investment and making the argument that Nigerian stories could find an audience beyond Nigeria. Some of those businesses disappeared. Others changed direction, and at least one of the early names is still building. Understanding what happened to them is necessary if we are to decide whether this moment represents a different kind of opportunity or another round of excitement around an old possibility.

AI belongs in this story, but it arrives rather late. The history starts with people who were already trying to turn the Nigerian imagination into something that could be played.

What became of the pioneers?

The temptation here is to put all the early companies in a box labelled failure and move quickly to the new generation. That would make the story easier to tell, but it would also obscure what we need to learn from it.

Kuluya is the clearest case of an early promise that did not become a lasting studio. By May 2016, participants in TechCabal’s Radar community were asking why its site had disappeared. A later industry study, published through Tshimologong, described Maliyo as the only one of the four early studios it listed still actively developing games at the time of its research. The public record documents the loss of momentum. It is less satisfactory as an explanation of the internal decisions that brought Kuluya to that point. [6] [7]

There are arguments in that old discussion about game quality, repeat play, valuations and whether the market was ready. Some may be persuasive. They are not a substitute for the company’s accounts or testimony from its founders. What we can say is that a catalogue, media attention and an investment valuation did not secure continuity. The $2 million figure was a valuation, incidentally, not the amount Kuluya had raised. That distinction was being lost in discussions of Nigerian games even then. [3] [6]

Gamsole requires more care. Techpoint’s account of Olaniran’s career puts the company beyond ten million downloads by early 2015. In 2016, its Lagos-themed Gidi Run became a flagship title on MTN Game+. This was a deliberate attempt to solve distribution and payment through an operator relationship rather than depend entirely on discovery in an app store. Gamsole was adapting its commercial approach, not merely watching a local-content idea fail. [8] [9]

The platform on which Gamsole found its early opening did not last. Microsoft ended support for the final Windows 10 Mobile release in December 2019. That is relevant background to the risks of building around someone else’s platform; it does not establish what caused Gamsole’s later trajectory. In 2020, Olaniran became chief technology officer at eLimu following CcHub’s acquisition of the education company. He died in July 2025, aged 36. The record I could verify does not provide a clean closure date or a complete financial history for Gamsole. Calling it simply a failed company would claim more than that record allows. [10] [11] [8]

ChopUp also leaves an incomplete public trail. Its website still explains a model in which subscriptions were deducted from airtime through telecom app stores. The later industry study places it among the early studios no longer actively developing at that research point. An old website remaining online does not settle its current operations, and the available evidence does not support inventing a single cause of failure. [12] [7]

Then there is Maliyo, whose continued work prevents us from treating the entire period as a false start. It launched GameUp Africa with Google in 2021, and developed Iwájú: Rising Chef with Disney and Kugali for a 2024 release. In Google’s August 2025 interview, Hugo Obi described a team of about thirty people, with ninety percent coming through the training programme. Those are company-reported figures, but the path is instructive: training, partnerships and repeated production, sustained over years. [13] [14] [15]

The later industry study identifies distribution, limited ways to collect payment, a shortage of game-development education and the difficulty of relying on organic discovery as constraints on the sector. Contemporary reporting on Gidi Run shows developers trying to work around precisely those problems. These are useful explanations of the environment in which the companies operated, even where they cannot settle why a particular company stopped. Better production tools address part of that environment. They do not automatically provide a route to paying players. [7] [9]

The earlier generation therefore gives us several histories rather than one. A studio can lose momentum. A founder can take accumulated skills into another sector. A company can survive by building capabilities that are not especially visible in a launch announcement. If we only pay attention when a game goes viral, we lose sight of most of the work involved.

How large is the market now?

There is a related distinction that often gets lost in the enthusiasm around a large Nigerian gaming market. Money spent on games in Nigeria is not the same thing as money earned by Nigerian game companies. Nigerians can sustain a sizeable market while most of the companies supplying that market are based elsewhere. A claim about the size of the audience does not, by itself, tell us how much local production that audience can support.

The current estimates are substantial, although they are not identical. Carry1st and Newzoo’s August outlook forecasts $226.6 million in Nigerian games revenue for 2026. PwC’s newer Africa Entertainment and Media Outlook, published on 13 October, lists $286 million for video games and esports in 2025 and forecasts $307 million for 2026. These are different publishers’ estimates with different stated categories. They should not be joined into a growth chart or quietly treated as the same measurement. [16] [17]

PwC also places social and casual games at seventy-seven percent of Nigerian gaming revenue in 2025, defining that category to include app-based and browser games. The report is evidence of an established market into which the recent launches arrive. It is not evidence that the AI-assisted games created that market. [17]

What is different this time?

The most obvious change is the ability to produce something quickly enough to take advantage of a moment. Reporting on Danfo Run describes Opeyemi Adeniran using Claude and generated visual assets over roughly four to five weeks. Shalom Rayhamen’s account of Lagos Life is that she began at night and released the first version the next morning, with Anthropic’s tools assisting research and coding. These are their reported experiences, not a general estimate of what AI saves every developer. Even so, the difference in what a small team can attempt is worth taking seriously. [19] [20]

Access to a capable model changes the practical meaning of having an idea. A developer may be able to move through unfamiliar code, experiment with an environment or replace a rough asset without waiting to assemble a full team around the first version. For someone building alongside other work, reducing that interval can determine whether the project is attempted at all. It can also make it possible to respond while the people who saw the first version are still interested.

There is experience behind that speed. Adeniran was already a software engineer. Rayhamen described almost a decade in software development. A tool that extends an experienced developer’s reach is a meaningful advance, but it is a different claim from saying experience no longer matters. [21] [22]

Distribution is another part of the change. A browser game can be passed around as a link and tried without installing an app. Yet even this has a history: Maliyo and Kuluya were making browser games in the earlier period. What deserves examination now is the combination of a readily shared link, familiar cultural material, a public feedback loop and tools that can help the developer keep responding. We should be precise about which part is newly possible and which part has become easier to combine. [4] [1]

In Lagos Life’s case, Rayhamen described an AI agent helping her track requests on X. This places the model inside an ongoing conversation about what to make next. It is a useful example of how production and feedback can become more closely connected. It still leaves the developer with the responsibility of deciding which requests will improve the game. [22]

What we should hope to build

In an earlier essay, I argued that imagination is a resource and that the worlds we create can influence the possibilities people see for themselves. Games are especially interesting in this regard. A player does not only watch a world; they move through it, make choices and discover what the world permits. There is value in young Nigerians encountering settings and characters that belong to their own environment, and eventually encountering ambitious versions of what that environment could become. [25]

The current enthusiasm should make us curious about that possibility without allowing us to forget the people who have been working on it. Maliyo’s training programme and continued production are part of this moment, even if a long training cycle is less likely to dominate a timeline than an overnight launch. Gamsole’s experiments with international audiences and telecom partnerships remain relevant. The disappointments of Kuluya are worth documenting properly, rather than reducing them to a warning attached to somebody else’s success.

What would convince me that something more durable is happening is the ability of these new developers to continue. Can a game keep a meaningful audience after the first burst of attention? Can the people making it collect enough revenue to improve it? Can one successful experiment support another, so that skills, money and experience accumulate rather than disappear between waves? These are not demands that every side project become a large company. They are questions about what it would take for many small experiments to strengthen an industry.

There is sufficient reason to be interested. We have examples of people using capable models to move ideas into the market quickly, and examples of players responding to experiences drawn from Nigerian life. The remaining work is to discover which of the earlier constraints have genuinely eased and which have simply become less visible during an exciting launch.

The history makes the present more significant to me. It shows how long people have wanted to make these worlds, how much they have already attempted, and how much knowledge is available if the new generation chooses to use it. If AI allows more of that ambition to become playable, it is a useful opening. Whether we turn the opening into a lasting industry will depend on what the builders, players and people backing them do with it.