Faced with a lack of enthusiasm and growth, game developers must work to create a gaming identity in Lebanon if they want to build a sustainable market, according to local experts.
"Everybody has an interest in this region and we need to work on this community in Lebanon, but also work in all of the MENA region," Habib Chams, project manager at MENA Conference 2015, told participants in a workshop Monday night at AltCity .
Chams was joined by Mohamad Haidar from KreationWare, Lara Noujaim from Game Cooks, and Wixel Studios ’ Ziad Feghali, who shared their expertise and tips with enthusiasts gathering for the first time under the umbrella of the Middle East Game Alliance (MEGAplay), a collaborative effort to help digital gaming startups in Lebanon.
Creating and sustaining a gaming community in Lebanon was a main concern for the experts, who had high hopes that it could one day rival rising communities in Tunisia and Morocco, which have started to attract investors from the West.
Feghali, co-founder of one of the biggest gaming studios in Lebanon, acknowledged that the gaming market in the Middle East and North Africa region was a “lost cause” because of its limited audience and encouraged developers to go out of their comfort zones.
Echoing Feghali, Haidar hinted that forming a local community could be the first step to get Lebanese game developers in touch with foreign investors and the wider entertainment industry. Haidar pressed gamers to “jump on the train” that is a rapidly expanding gaming industry, saying that in Lebanon, developers “need to catch up.”
Despite the daunting idea of launching a gaming community in the country, Noujaim, marketing manager at Game Cooks, the gaming development company which gave us games like Escape from Paradise and Run for Peace, was quick to reassure participants by promising that companies like Game Cooks would jump at the chance to endorse “game developers aspiring to create success stories.”
But in order to do so, experts say that Lebanese game developers should work on defining the core for game development in the country by increasing activities that would bring the community to network and band together.
Participants at the meetup acknowledged that facing resistance from friends, family, peers, and environment was a real deterrent to creating a prospering gaming community in Lebanon, without taking into account the more general obstacles like chronic electricity shortages and lack of fast WiFi.
“My [gamer] friend’s laptop honestly fried because of the electricity,” one gamer shared with the group.
Game enthusiasts took the opportunity to ask the experts about technical tips to improve current projects they’d been working on, with one 17-year-old announcing that he was about to go live with his game.
“Never launch without having others pick through it and test it,” Feghali counseled, instead proposing that aspiring developers should develop a local platform for game testing and development, perhaps even a website.
The issue of women in gaming, which had the male majority rolling their eyes and grumbling about an “outdated” topic, was an inescapable one. All four industry professionals, and specifically MENA Games Conference manager Chams, admitted that the severe lack of women in gaming was exacerbated by a patriarchal society that doesn’t recognize that women could prosper in a traditionally male field. Women in the industry only count for 3 percent of the global developing community, despite recent reports showing that there are more women who play games than men .
In an effort to kickstart Lebanon's gaming community, MEGAplay has planned a series of events throughout the month, with the next one already scheduled for August 19 in collaboration with Lamba Labs .