Beirut - Revenues generated by the gaming industry in the MENA region are projected to reach $3.2 billion in 2016 compared to over $70 billion globally, Telecommunications Minister Boutros Harbsaid.
“What started as casual electronic games in the mid ’70s, have grown tremendously over the last decade to become a multibillion dollar industry, defying all rules and predictions,” he said.
Harb said that the gaming industry has proven to be a great contributor to economic growth and job creation, but he voiced his intention to create a proper gaming ecosystem in Lebanon to provide domestic talents with the necessary tools to enable them to export their products but remain in the country.
Business ecosystems are networks providing complementary services and products within an industry, that evolve their capabilities and roles over time.
“I decided to play a proactive role in this ecosystem in a bid to ensure that Lebanon is a producer in this industry and not just a consumer,” Harb said.
“We need to work on a strategic policy to reach this goal,” he added.
His remarks came during the opening of the MENA Games Conference and Exhibition Thursday in Mar Mikhael train station. The event, which was organized by IFP, features over 30 speakers and aims to create awareness among the MENA region’s investors and promote investment in the gaming industry.
Harb highlighted the huge profits generated by this lucrative industry and cited the example of the game “Call of Duty: Black Ops,” which collected $650 million in sales revenue within five days of its launch.
“Can you imagine how profitable this industry can be for companies and to the economy in general?” he said.
Likewise, Marwan Hayek, chairman and CEO of alfa, emphasized the importance of the gaming industry, noting that it is growing at an average of 13 percent in the Middle East, which is considered to be higher than the overall global rate of growth. “The industry’s revenues in the Middle East are expected to grow from $1.6 billion in 2014 to $4.4 billion in 2022,” he said.
Hayek said that the growth in this industry is partly attributed to the spread in the use of tablets and smartphones around the world, which provides easy access to mobile games.
In the case of Lebanon, Hayek believes that growth in the gaming industry will improve in the coming years because of the increased penetration of broadband, smartphones and Facebook.
“Lebanon has one of the highest rates of smartphones penetration in the world at 77 percent, which is higher than the U.S. and South Korea,” he said.
Kate Edwards, executive director at the International Game Developers Association, praised Harb’s willingness to support Lebanon’s gaming industry.
She emphasized the need to design games for the global audience and not just for producers’ domestic markets.
“Designing a successful game that would be accepted and played by all kinds of audiences requires many steps and not just the translation of the game to the local language of the country,” she said.
“One should ask about the kind of people who are going to play the game and I am sure that most developers want as many people as possible to enjoy the application,” she added. “To do so, one should think more of developing games that suit all cultures.”
Echoing Edwards’ views, Samir Abou Samra, Chief Technology Officer at DigiPen, said he would like to see the localization of foreign games to make them fit for this region. “But I would also like Europe and North America to start localizing games that have been developed in the Middle East,” he added. “So why don’t we start to produce successful games originating from this area?”
Abou Samra praised technology experts in the Middle East region for their achievements in recent years.
He said that Boeing named DigiPen as its top supplier of technology for the year 2008 and 60 percent of the team working on this technology was comprised of experts from the Middle East region.
“We could have made this achievement from this region and not from the U.S. but we left the region seeking stability,” he said.
Abou Samra also praised the stimulus packages announced by the Central Bank of Lebanon to support entrepreneurs. “The support of the government is very important and crucial as well,” he said. “DigiPen succeeded because it had the support of the local government of the state of Washington, the local development board and the ministry of education.
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