What do you do when you don't see your story in the games you play?
For Hugo Obi, from Lagos, Nigeria, the answer was to build it himself.
In this #WeArePlay film, learn how he founded Maliyo Games to turn authentic African culture into fun, relatable games that are now captivating players worldwide.
Beyond downloads, what’s the one metric you track to know if your game's vision is truly resonating with players?
#Googleplay#playdeveloper#Africagaming
[MUSIC PLAYING] HUGO: Like most people, I grew up playing games. I would describe what we do with Maliyo Games as taking the love for Nigeria and sharing it, so having people being able to experience our world, our environment through games. I love Lagos. I love the energy of the city. Part of its beauty is its architecture. I want to show you something. So with Safari City, we wanted to design a game that really empowers people to think about design and think about the use of infrastructure. So through Safari City, you're able to do property renovations by taking abandoned properties and really beautifying them and bringing them to their glory. When we think about the games that we make, you need different skill sets to actually bring those ideas to life. And that's one of the big challenges that we encountered in our early years. And one of the ways that we mitigated that was to invest in talent development with the GameUp Africa training program, identifying, nurturing, training young people to be able to make games. The unique thing about Maliyo is that we try to make games that are based on our environment. All of our engineers have come through this program. So we have this true sense of community. That unified vision is something that drives every single person who's part of the company. You can get a sense of like, what that city looks like. That is kind of a futuristic representation of how we want people to live. With Google Play Console, the teams are able to do internal releases for testing. They can time when they want an update to go out. The tools are very easy to use. Just through the click of a few buttons, you can get your game distributed around the world. We need to be able to do especially the version comparison. Hey! Hi! We have so many stories, and we want to share them with audiences around the world. But our medium for telling stories is video games. There are things that we genuinely love about the place that makes us stay. So we want people to feel and see and enjoy what we live and breathe every single day. [MUSIC PLAYING]
