Kucheza Gaming founder Bukola Akingbade explains why Africa's future in games depends on collaboration, commercial sustainability and creating experiences people genuinely want to play.
By Mathias Gredal Nørvig
Recorded at the first international Games & SDG Summit in Nairobi, this episode of the Good Game Club podcast - Building Africa's Gaming Future - captures an African games industry moving from ambition to action. Across the continent, studios are becoming more collaborative, more commercially focused and increasingly confident in creating games that reflect local cultures while reaching global audiences.
Few people have championed that transformation as consistently as Bukola Akingbade. As CEO and Founder of Kucheza Gaming, she has helped build one of Nigeria's best-known independent studios while also playing a leading role in developing the wider ecosystem through initiatives including Lagos Games Week. Her work spans commercial game development, education and cultural storytelling, united by a belief that games should be both sustainable businesses and meaningful creative experiences.
My conversation with Akingbade traces her journey from digital marketing into game development and explores why audience-first thinking has shaped every decision she has made since founding Kucheza. She reflects on the rapid evolution of Africa's games industry, the importance of collaboration over competition, and the opportunities that mobile gaming, education and cultural authenticity present for the continent's next generation of studios.
Above all, Akingbade argues that successful games must first and foremost be enjoyable to play. Commercial success, cultural impact and positive social change all begin with the same foundation: creating experiences that players genuinely love.
This interview, hosted by Mathias Gredal Nørvig, has been edited and condensed from the original Good Game Club podcast for length and clarity.
Could you introduce yourself and tell us a bit about what Kucheza Gaming is doing?
I'm the CEO and Founder of Kucheza Gaming. We are a Lagos-based studio out of Nigeria.
We work on our own games. We have one published game called The Wild Kingdoms. It's a mobile adventure game based on Yoruba mythology. My tribe is Yoruba, so that's essentially what the game is based on, but it's meant to be a fun adventure game.
We also do games in education through a partnership with Ukie (the UK’s interactive entertainment trade association), where we use games to teach computing education in public high schools in Nigeria because there's no computing in our national curriculum and no real way for these students to learn the computing skills they need for life. Last but not least, we also convene Lagos Games Week, which is now in its third edition.
You're also one of the veterans in the Nigerian gaming scene - can you tell us a bit more about how you got started with games and how the gaming scene in Nigeria has developed?
I grew up playing games. My first console was a Commodore 64, and it was one of the best things that happened to us as a family because, when we were home from boarding school, we got a chance to play. I really grew up playing games. I found them fun. But I went off to school, studied architecture, and really wanted to get into advertising. My background was purely marketing - digital marketing specifically. I worked in London and then moved back to Nigeria to start an agency. As a marketing person, consumer behaviour is a huge part of what you try to understand. I saw it first-hand in our first son. Initially, he would spend his entertainment time watching television. Then after a while it was purely YouTube. Then after a while it was purely YouTube watching people play games – as time progressed, with his brothers.
I got really curious about it because I knew playing games was entertaining but watching games I couldn't really understand. They kept saying, "No, no, no, it's entertaining." Whether they had the game they were watching or not didn't matter. Watching people play games mattered to them as entertainment. From that perspective, I saw the important role games played in their lives.
What movies were for us, or music as teenagers, I started to see that games had become for that generation. For about two years I got really sucked into games. I loved it. I was fascinated by them. I got back playing games and trying to understand them, especially from a bonding perspective with my kids. After two years I just woke up and thought, "Guys, look, we have to do this." Games had become so pivotal in their lives that it felt really strange there weren't too many Nigerian companies getting into games.
You have a slightly different angle coming from a marketing background – how have you experienced your profession play into gaming?
By default, I am audience-first in approach and data first. When I was trying to start a company, one of the main challenges I had was that, yes, the scale of the industry is big and the potential impact for change is huge, but I didn't feel like there was a role. How could Africa really play? For a long time, I didn't see it. With mobile, that started opening up the opportunity.
It was when I discovered, through data, the intersection between games and education that I felt, actually, there's something here. It was the data that led me there because I just didn't see how Africa can play. Even when it comes to building games and designing games, I lean a lot into the data. People often say, "Build the game you play." Yes. But the main thing is the data. Sometimes you look at it and see that simulation games are fantastic. The question becomes: how might we apply this in our context in a way that's something we would also like to play? Thinking about the audience and the user is really important to me.
The second part is finding the shortest possible time to get a playable or paper playable into the hands of users. Getting people playing, iterating and trying to understand. At the end of the day, that gives you a real sense of where the fun is and what people think. Focussing on player experience is a huge part of how I look at games.
The Wild Kingdoms comes with a very unique art style. How did that come about, and what audience did you have in mind?
We launched the company in October 2019, and we wanted to start with games and education because that was where we thought we could play. We had plans to start our studio five years later, around 2024. Then Covid hit and we're at home thinking, "What's going to happen?"
After a few months at home I said, "Look, we had plans to do a studio anyway. Everybody's at home. Let's figure this out." A few years earlier I had seen a book called The Wild Kingdoms, which was heavily researched around Yoruba mythology. I reached out to the writer and his team, and we got into a conversation. That was actually how we got to the game.
In terms of the audience we had in mind, we didn't have a local audience, to be honest with you. Games, at their heart, are just meant to be fun. You find your audience where you do. About 55 per cent of our downloads are from Brazil because of the historical Afro-Brazilian connection. We think that's why.
In that case, we didn't really start with the audience first because Covid threw us into it. But as we progressed in our design, we started out of scope and got frustrated through that process. We sought counsel with people in the industry, and the advice was to scale to the smallest possible thing and ship. We took that advice, and that was how we were able to get the first chapter of the game out.
I know you as one of the people in the industry in Nigeria that people look up to both with your knowledge of the industry and your dedication to it and what you think it can do. How have you seen it change over the last five to ten years?
When I got into the industry, we started brand first, maybe because of my background. I had to think about what we were going to be about as a company and what was going to matter to us. I'm a firm believer that, as an African business, you obviously must earn to be able to do what you want to do, but you can't be around everything that's happening and not have a mission as part of what you're doing. We always started brand-first so we knew who we were. When we started, there were not too many studios or developers in that mould. We've seen that change, which I think is fantastic.
When I came into the industry, the sense I got—not just from developers but from esports as well—was that there was more competition. I've seen that change from a more competitive industry to a collaborative industry. That's been a phenomenal change, and all the players should be credited for that.
The other thing is there's been more sensitisation about working on your craft, monetisation and trying to create something sustainable. Previously, people obviously wanted to earn from making games, but maybe the levers weren't there for them to understand how to, or to be empowered to do so. That also is changing. There's a lot more education. More interventions, like we're here in Nairobi.
Payments and infrastructure are improving. We have ecosystem initiatives happening both in Nigeria and outside. We have delegations going to Gamescom and to Europe to get a broader perspective and to do business development. Versus five years ago, there's a lot more hope. Not just hope - blind optimism - but it feels like we're closer to making the shift from potential to real, tangible action.
Looking forward, what is the outlook for both the Nigerian scene and the regional scene for games in the next five or ten years?
Having a sustainable ecosystem is by far the most important thing. If not, we'll have more people leaving the games industry. We're not going to have as many people coming through. We're not going to be able to see the impact in culture or mental health, play therapy, education or all the things games have to offer.
For me, having a sustainable ecosystem is by far the most important thing. Not just one or two outliers but having a larger ecosystem that is thriving. The pathways to that can be different. When we were doing our research, we watched case studies of successful studios in Europe and the US. We saw some of the things they did while they were working on their games. They had commercial projects on one side and worked on their own games with what they'd learned, keeping the lights on with what they'd earned. That's one pathway.
Mobile also opens up huge opportunity to create something quickly. The audience and market are there. We've had a lot of discussion around localising and creating for your own communities so you can build skill. In the next five years, our goal is to have studios that earn over $100 million. That's the goal we've set as an ecosystem. That's the central ambition we're trying to get studios to keep thinking about.
One of the things we try to do through Good Game Club is inspire people both inside and outside the games industry. Parents, in particular, often ask what games really mean for their children. What is it for you?
First, being in games has made me a cool parent. My kids tell their friends, "Your mum or your dad needs to talk to my mum." So that's fantastic. The first thing I normally tell parents is this: your children are going to play games. Let's just get that over and done with. It doesn't matter how much you try - they're going to do it. If you understand that is the case, then your perspective shouldn't be to try to mitigate that. It should be further down the line.
As a parent, there's a role you have to play. Make sure they play age-appropriate games. If they have other things to do, think about games more as enrichment. Don't think about them as something you simply need to restrict. Think about them more holistically. Think about games as a platform that you also need to understand so that you can bond with your children.
If Covid taught us anything, it's that the social nature of games is remarkable. My son is in university, away from the family, and most weekends he's playing FIFA Ultimate Team with his brother in Lagos, his friend in Germany and whoever else around the world in their friend group cares to join. That's how they stay connected.
As parents, we first need to try to understand the real potential and power of games, and what they mean to our children. Because it means a lot more than just fun. There's fun, of course, but there's a social and community side that matters to them as well. Ultimately, if you really want to get into it, you can say, "Look, you play this so much, you might as well get something out of it apart from this." Then put them on a path where they get to understand a bit more about the careers and potential pathways in games. That's what I'd tell them.
Gaming for good is something that’s near and dear to the Good Game Club podcast. What does that idea mean to you?
I think that's a great question. I firmly believe - it's one of the reasons why I love Playing for the Planet and the Green Game Jam - that games must, at heart, be fun. Whilst it does matter that ten people play an educational game, I would rather have 50 million people knowing about what this is and trying to move those people to action.
Games for good, for me, is using the advantage that we have as studios and as IP owners to move forward a cause at scale. That's why I love the Playing for the Planet initiative. Sometimes, in discussions with NGOs, you have to explain why the fun must be there because that's why people play games. Otherwise, you're going to have educational games that stay on the shelf. For the impact side to really work, you need it to be fun. It needs to be something that people love, and then they can learn from it. That's the order it needs to be for me.
Watch or listen to the full conversation with Bukola Akingbade – ‘Building Africa's Gaming Future’ - on the Good Game Club podcast here Good Game Club Podcast - YouTube.
