The following is a post from George Ahere (co-founder of Weza Interactive Entertainment) who touts a framework drawn from African music, anime, K-pop and Hip Hop for African game studios ready to stop chasing relevance and start creating it is needed.
We taught the world how to move. It is time we taught it how to play.
Afrobeats did not ask for a seat at the global table. It built its own table, pulled up its own chairs, and the whole world came and sat down. Burna Boy sold out London Stadium. Rema hit a billion streams. Amapiano went from South African townships to Seoul dance studios in under a decade. African music carved out its own global market not by chasing relevance but by being so undeniably, so unapologetically itself that relevance had no choice but to follow.
African gaming has the same potential. We are sitting on a billion-dollar market growing at 12% annually, a continent of 1.4 billion people with the youngest population on earth, and a diaspora of over 200 million spread across every major city in the world. Already spending. Already hungry. Already looking for something in digital form that finally feels like home.
And yet not one African-made game sits in the global top 1000.
That is not a talent problem. That is a strategy problem. And I believe our music already handed us the answer. We just have not applied it yet.
After studying how Afrobeats, Hip Hop, K-pop, Anime and Bollywood each built their own global audiences from the inside out, I found four moves they all made. I am calling it the Cultural Gravity Model. Here is what it looks like and why I believe it is the most important framework African game studios are not yet using.
Stage 1: Find Your Rhythm
Every culture that went global did not invent something from nothing. It listened deeply to what was already alive in its people and found a creative way to harmonise with it.
Hip Hop did not come from a strategy meeting. It came from kids in the South Bronx rapping about their actual lives, their actual pain, their actual joy. It had soul because it was lived. Fela Kuti was not designing music for export. He was a freedom fighter using sound as protest, as resistance, as truth. People felt it everywhere because real things travel. Anime is not fantasy for the sake of fantasy. It is a continuous, deep re-examination of Japanese culture — of honour, belonging, the tension between tradition and progress. That rootedness is precisely why it conquered the world.
The rhythm already exists inside your culture. Your job is not to invent it. It is to pay deep enough attention to hear it, and then build something that harmonises with it so powerfully that people who have actually lived this experience cannot look away.
For African game developers, this means asking a harder question than most of us ask. Not just: does my game look African, but: does it feel African in its bones? In its design logic? In the emotions it pulls from people who have actually lived this? Because the most specific and lived creative roots produce the widest eventual reach. Build something true enough and the whole world eventually recognises itself inside it. Because underneath all our differences, we are running the same human software. Struggle resonates everywhere. Identity resonates everywhere. Joy resonates everywhere.
And this is where your first real audience is born. Before the diaspora. Before the global market. The people who live the rhythm you are building will be your first believers. They are the ones who will look at what you have made and say: this is mine, this is us, this is real. That local fire, that genuine, visceral recognition from your home community, is not just a nice thing to have. It is the proof of concept that everything else is built on. A game that does not move its own people first will never move the world.
Ask yourself: Is my IP, my gameplay, my aesthetic, my sound rooted in a lived African experience that people can truly identify with? Or am I building a costume of African culture worn over someone else’s skeleton?
Stage 2: Activate Your People First
Once you have found your rhythm and your home audience is alive and buzzing, your next move is not to chase the world. It is to find where your people already are beyond your borders.
When Afrobeats began its global ascent, it was not Western radio stations that discovered it. It was Nigerians in London, Ghanaians in Berlin, West Africans in New York, carrying their rhythm into diaspora dance halls, house parties and playlists long before any major label paid attention. The diaspora was not an afterthought. It was the launchpad. K-pop used the same strategy. Korean communities seeded the culture globally through fan networks in Southeast Asia, Europe and the US before the mainstream ever paid attention.
For African gaming, this opportunity is extraordinary and almost entirely untouched. Over 200 million Africans in the diaspora already stream our music, wear our fashion and keep our languages breathing in homes across every major city on earth. They carry both the cultural hunger and the spending power. A game built from their roots does not need a $20 million marketing budget to find them. It finds them because it was made for them, from the same soil they carry in their chest wherever they go.
Here is the strategy. The revenue from that diaspora market becomes the capital you reinvest back into building the continental market long term. As mobile penetration deepens, as the middle class grows, as infrastructure catches up to the talent that has always been here, the continent becomes the long game. The diaspora funds the beachhead. The beachhead grows the continent.
This is a deliberate, generational business strategy.
Ask yourself: Have I built something so authentically local that my home community already feels it in their bones? And do I know where in the world the communities are that share that same rhythm, that same hunger, that same identity?
Stage 3: Stop Making Products. Start Building Worlds.
This is where good creative industries separate from great cultural movements.
At some point, being a fan of something stops being about consumption and starts being about identity. You are not someone who listens to Afrobeats. You are Afrobeats. You are not someone who watches anime. You are an Otaku. You are not someone who follows K-pop. You are part of a fandom, a movement, a living culture that extends into every corner of your life.
That transformation from product to identity does not happen by accident. K-pop built Weverse, fan cafes, comeback rituals, anniversary events and concert experiences where every light stick had its own unique frequency. Afrobeats built Detty December, Afrochella, and Afrobeats nights in London that became cultural institutions. These were not marketing campaigns. They were the architecture of belonging. They were infrastructure built so that fans could stop being consumers and start becoming the culture itself.
When your community reaches this stage, they stop being your audience and start being your movement. They translate for you. They advocate for you. They bring others in. They wear your identity as their own and spread it further than any paid campaign ever could.
For game studios, this means thinking beyond the game from day one. Are you at conventions? Do you have community rituals? Can people experience your world outside of playing it? Are you creating spaces where your players stop being players and start becoming something? Because if the answer is no, you have a product. Products have users. Worlds have believers. And believers build markets.
Nyamakop’s Relooted shows what this looks like in practice. An Afrofuturist heist game set in a future Johannesburg built around reclaiming stolen African artifacts from Western museums, it is a premise so specific, so charged with lived cultural meaning, that players do not just play it. They feel implicated in it. They belong to it. It launched simultaneously on PC, Xbox and Game Pass, not by softening its identity for international audiences, but by making that identity so undeniable that the world had no choice but to show up.
Ask yourself: Is my IP becoming something people are, or just something people do?
Stage 4: Multiply From Strength, Never From Desperation
At some point, your rhythm will be loud enough that others will want to dance to it. That is the moment for strategic crossover. But how you enter that moment matters as much as the moment itself.
Beyoncé did not introduce Afrobeats to the world. Afrobeats had already built its gravity. What she did was recognise a force already in motion and choose to align with it, because she understood it, respected it, and felt its power. BTS did not need Coldplay to become BTS. They had already built a fandom that moved mountains. When Coldplay came, it was two cultural forces meeting each other with mutual respect and shared resonance. The result was multiplication.
We are already seeing it happen. Disney sought out a local Nigerian developer to build the official game tie-in for their animated series Iwájú, invited studios to pitch, and chose Maliyo Games because, in Hugo Obi’s own words, “We are on the ground. We understand the market and the end users. It is our story.” Disney did not come for a studio that could mimic their style. They came for one that could not be replicated. From Nigeria as well, Dimension 11 Studios attracted Xbox backing for Legends of Orisha not by softening Yoruba mythology for Western palatability, but by building it so authentically that Xbox had no choice but to come to the table.
Two studios. One continent. One strategy. Build from identity. The world comes to you.
The trap is seeking these partnerships before your garden is grown. A wrong partnership does not just fail to amplify you. It can dilute you. It can bend the identity you have spent years building into a shape that confuses the very community that believed in you first.
Build your community first. Build your world first. Build your identity until the rhythm is so loud and so alive that the right partners are naturally drawn to it. Not because you asked. Because they heard the music and could not stay away.
Ask yourself: Am I seeking this partnership from a place of cultural confidence or creative desperation? And does this partner truly understand and value what I am building?
The Strategy is Proven. Now Comes the Courage.
This is what Riziki, our rhythm game at Weza Interactive, is built on. African music, dance and movement are not decorations inside the game. They are the game. We are not building for a vague international market. We are building from lived African experience outward, rooting it deeply enough that our own people feel it first, activating the diaspora as our strategic first wave, and building a world our community can genuinely belong to.
We are not the only ones. Studios across the continent are beginning to move this way. The proof exists. The playbook is written. What is needed now is the collective strategic conviction to follow it all the way through.
The truth is that what has held us back is not talent and not culture. It has been a fragmented strategy, thin capital, underdeveloped collaboration between studios, and business models built around survival rather than market creation. Those are real problems. But they are solvable problems. And they only remain unsolvable when we try to solve them alone, on foreign terms, waiting for permission from a system that was not built with us in mind.
Anime did not ask Hollywood for permission. K-pop did not wait for American radio. Hip Hop did not soften itself to fit. They built their own gravity. They created their own markets. They made the world come to them.
African gaming can do the same. The question is not whether we are ready. The question is whether we are willing.
Usipojipanga, utapangwa.
If you do not organise yourself, you will be organised by others.
We choose to plan.
PlayRiziki Trailer
Are you building a product or a world? And is the IP you are creating rooted deeply enough in lived experience that your local audience feels it first?
Do you agree or disagree? I would love to hear how other creators and studios are thinking about this.
Odongo George Ahere | CEO, Weza Interactive Entertainment
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