With Playtopia, the annual destination of Indie Games & Immersive Arts festival and conference set to return in 2025, GIA has partnered with the event to share insights from the crop of supremely talented creators in attendance. Next up in a series of speaker interviews is Khumo Moerane.

You’re returning to Playtopia – how has your experience at previous editions of Playtopia shaped your approach this time around, both personally and for your work from Africa Space Programme (ASP) to Disputed People Video games?

I gave a my first ever talk at as a game developer at my first ever Playtopia back in 2019 about my first ever game Kea’s World. I have a deep appreciation for Playtopia from a personal growth and work perspective. From creating Kea’s World as a solo dev under my then company Africa Space Programme to joining the amazing team at Disputed People Games and creating the Khamani: The Lion of Summer games, my love, and ambition of developing incredibly fun & epic Africa inspired video game universes has grown exponentially. What I am obsessed with now is how do we make all South Africans know that we make games and most importantly make them fall in love with them. So me my approach this year is to ask lots of questions of everyone at Playtopia will the goal of learning and seeing what we can implement going forward towards achieving this.

In your 2019 interview you spoke about the need to build an African games market for African games. How has that vision evolved in the years since, and what concrete steps will you highlight at Playtopia to advance that market?

While I still believe that we need more Africa focused games, we really need to push for them to be seen and played more by South Africans. So for me now the idea has evolved into how do we bring the rest of South Africa along with us on this journey. South Africans know about the big international titles, but they don’t know that we have an indie video games industry in the country. Every major creative industry and sporting code has the country behind it, they have South African inspired names that people rally around and in a way this makes them feel uniquely ours. So for one, what could we call locally our made games? You know there is no Setswana or isiXhosa word for video game, and that for me says there is a deep disconnect somewhere in there. We need to bridge this somehow, while its always cool for these things to happen organically, we gotta help jump start the movement and try things out, try and connect with South Africans on a deeper emotional level.

What are some of the new challenges or opportunities you’ve encountered since you first spoke in 2019—especially with reference to funding, talent development, publishing, and pan-African collaboration—and how will you address them during your Playtopia presence?

The biggest challenge is still funding and having a long enough runway for studios to experiment and build great games. As our CEO always says, gaming needs patient capital. Capital that understands this industry takes time, lots of iteration, and resilience. We all just need to stay in the game long enough, and we’ll crack it.

The next major challenge is being able to have experienced team members who can help you move faster and push the quality of the product much higher. We as a studio are trying our best to create that balance of a mix of talented young devs with experienced devs. We are optimistic with what we are doing. We are just one big hit away that will allow us to hire more people, offer more stability, and create the kind of mentorship pipeline that lifts the whole industry.

I am excited about that hit, inward-facing, Africa-inspired game that will come out one day and take over the world. It will fundamentally shift how people here, across the continent, and around the world see and feel about Africa inspired video games. I just hope it will be us who crack it <3

Regarding pan-African and local collaboration, I would really love to see us work together towards creating our own unique voice and genres across the continent. We need to find ways to be intentional about it, to find what is special about us, something that we only could have have made. And then expand on it, improve it, stretch and explore every possible creative permutation of it.

Given the growing global interest in African culture and storytelling, how do you see Playtopia’s role in connecting African game-makers with international partners, and how do you plan to facilitate that through Disputed People Video Games?

It’s awesome that there is a growing interest and Playtopia is the perfect place to focus all that energy and attention into one place. What they’ve done with the arcade area is epic and I really think ordinary South Africans would have a blast in there, playing all these super different and creative indie games.

It’s awesome that as an event is growing from strength to strength each year along with the quality of games on show. This means more international producers and publishers will be interested in coming through and checking it out, which will definitely lead to more opportunities for our developers and studios.

I’ve really enjoyed meeting and forming amazing friendships with developers from around Africa at Playtopia and Africa Games Week. It’s amazing that they make it out here consistently year after year and it would be really great for us to also go over to their countries to support their events and showcase our games there. I plan to make more of an effort to do so on our side as a studio.

Many developers in Africa still cite revenue-generation and local market size as major constraints. At Playtopia, how will you address the business side of the African games industry (monetisation, platform access, regional distribution) beyond the creative storytelling perspective?

We are up against it hey, we need to make more Africa inspired games but we are finding it hard to monetise them, that is a really difficult dance for many studios fighting to stay alive. What we’ve seen is studios looking for ways to generate revenue through gamification while working on their commercial games. We also have to look at the make up of our studios, we need to get more business focused people in them. It can be really tricky as a solely creative leaning studio to have to apply for funding with getting all the administrative documents ready while also juggling making an awesome game. One of the things I love about our studio, is that we have a great balance of both creative and business people at management level. In this way, we are able to make sure that every facet of running a studio is operating at a high level and aligned with making our company a success.

Finally, what concrete milestone or indicator would you consider a “win” from your return to Playtopia in the next 12 months, and how will your engagement at the event contribute toward achieving it?

I am really obsessed with this idea of engaging more with South Africans, so a win for me would be South African indie game development becoming more mainstream in the country. It would be amazing if you could go out on the street in anywhere South Africa and ask random person if they know of a South African made game and they be able to immediately name one off the top of their heads.

I would also love to see more non-industry people attending Playtopia, imagine a Playtopia satellite event at one of the townships around Cape Town, that would be super awesome.

Another win would be to have a South African games publisher whose sole mission is to promote South African games here and around the world. That would be epic. Then lastly for our studio, I would love for the new game we are working on to be a super big hit, that blows up worldwide and we win the best game at Playtopia in 2026 🙂

Check out the full program and consider joining Playtopia, which will run from December 5th to 6th December 2025 in Cape Town.