Across the Middle East, young Arabs are increasingly eschewing the traditional pastimes of their parents and instead hunker in front of computer screens, chatting with friends and playing games.
Since 2000, internet penetration in the region has increased more than tenfold to almost 46m users last year, according to Internet World Statistics. Telecoms operators are rolling out high-speed internet to most of the region, and broadband use has exploded.
Increased bandwidth has allowed online computer gaming to take off.
In homes and internet cafés from Marrakech to Muscat, young people – who often have little else in the way of entertainment – are hammering keyboards and hurling abuse at opponents through their headsets. They are playing “massively multi-player online games”, such as World of Warcraft and Counterstrike .
The popularity of so-called MMO games has turned companies such as Blizzard, creator of World of Warcraft , into entertainment industry heavyweights and attracted a flurry of start-ups. These smaller companies are betting that MMOs will eclipse traditional single-player computer games.
Gamepower 7, in Dubai, is one of the few such companies based in the Middle East.
“The trend globally is moving away from single and multi-player computer games and towards massively multi-player online games, and we decided to go with the trend,” says Fadi Mujahid, general manager of Gamepower 7.
“It is almost impossible to sell single-player games here in the region due to rampant software piracy.”
Gamepower 7 was established a year and a half ago to capitalise on the youthful demographics and increase in broadband penetration in the region.
Its flagship game, Rappelz , is a “port” – or software translation – of a popular South Korean game where players attempt to bring peace to a world of three warring nations.
But rather than a plain translation into Arabic, the company has changed significant parts of the game to fit the region’s cultural peculiarities – “localisation” as this is called.
“In an online game you ‘live’ there, you immerse yourself in it and have to feel at home there. In every culture there are certain taboos, certain no-no’s,” says Mr Mujahid.
The South Korean original featured three separate feuding races and religions, which had potentially negative connotations in the Middle East, so the company changed it to three warring kingdoms.
Gamepower 7 had to remodel the female characters’ clothing. “They are all dressed in revealing, lingerie-like clothing, which doesn’t go down well in the region,” says Mr Mujahid.
So far, the localised Rappelz has been a success. The company says it has 60,000 registered users, of whom 10,000-12,000 are active. At any given time there will be about 800 people – mainly from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Algeria and the United Arab Emirates – in the online world.
Gamepower 7 plans to move to a subscription basis soon, charging $10-$15 a month, and will publish three more localised online games in 2009.
It expects the number of internet users in the region to rise to 60m over the next two to three years, and hopes to capture at least 10 per cent of those as gamers.
The company is “looking for investors to help grow into a global firm”, says Mr Mujahid.
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