Courtesy of Semafor, interesting analysis of a recent survey on video games in Africa:

I’ve been digging into a survey on video game players across Africa, by Geopoll/Pan Africa Gaming Group, looking for nuggets. It’s a sector which is still in its early stages of development on the continent and has very little analytical coverage. While it had a relatively small sample size of just over 2,500 people in Egypt, Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa, surveys like this can be useful for showing trends of user habits.

In this case, while it isn’t surprising that up to half of users aren’t that keen on paying for mobile games given how much free content there is available, it’s worth noting that the other half seem happy to pay for their virtual treasure troves and magical swords. There are more credit card payments than you might think and plenty of mobile money payments driven by Kenyan gamers.

The amounts being spent today are small. Of the 63% of respondents who have splashed out on a game or an in-game purchase, the largest segment (29%) spent around $2 to $5 a month, or less than $2 a month (26%). But again, these are not insignificant amounts in local currencies, spent over millions of users, if you consider the youth of African markets and how fast many of these economies are growing (though not necessarily the four big ones surveyed here).

There’s a decent chance that African e-commerce gets a long term fillip from gaming as young users get accustomed to spending their money online with games. It also points to the fintech opportunities across a wide range of sectors as operators try to make payments as seamless as possible.

Candy Crush was the most popular video game brand in a survey of users in four major African countries: Egypt, Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa, with about 10.4% market share. Next in line was Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG) with 6%, according to the Geopoll/Pan Africa Gaming Group survey. But when various football games were combined they accounted for a slightly larger share than PUBG. Unsurprisingly, mobile dominates the African games market with more than 90% of respondents playing games on their phones and nearly half (45%) playing at least 1-2 hours a day.