African Start-Up’ on CNN: How a Nigerian entrepreneur found a way to turn his love for gaming into a successful business

‘African Start-Up’ on CNN International meets Abiola Olaniran, a Nigerian entrepreneur who created his first game at University and then launched Gamsole, after spotting the growing demand for games worldwide.

Olaniran came up with the idea in 2012, and his first game, Road Blazer was downloaded 40 thousand times. Since, he has had his games for phones and tablets downloaded more than 10 million times across 191 countries. Olaniran tells ‘African Start-Up’, “We realised there are not so many African games out there, and what we want to do is create African stories for the global audience.”

According to PricewaterhouseCoopers, Nigeria’s gaming market will reach $170 million by 2017. Olanarian and Gamsole are central to that growth as African sales make up a healthy five per cent of his company’s growth.

It is Latin American though, where most of the downloads come from. Olaniran tells ‘African Start-Up’, “We tend to have a lot of downloads in regions like Latin America, for instance, we get like 24 per cent of our downloads from Brazil. In some other regions like India, in Asia and a couple of other countries like Indonesia, we get a lot of downloads from there.”

Olanarian talks to ‘African Start-Up’ about of the early days of his company, recalling he received $35,000 in seed funding, which allowed him to expand. To date, Gamsole has released 35 games and generates over $30,000 a month, selling the games for free but placing advertisements in them.

He concludes African Start-up by saying: “We want to create games that everybody all around the world will appreciate,” notes Olanarian. “If you are going to put the game in either Google Play or the IOS app store, or Windows store, those stores are global, so why limit yourself to the local audience.”