@seyitaylor@Nosa_O I agree that the business is pretty damn tough, sure. But you honestly don’t need to be King or Zynga to survive.
I used to work for a company that has been running for over a decade making games. They never reached the levels of success of King, and they never got funding as large as $2 million. But rather than make a hundred generic games a month, they put out a few quality titles consistently every year until they caught the eye of bigger publishers who came to them when they were looking to bring their IP to mobile.
There are literally hundreds of video game companies that work this way all over the world. I’ve met with a lot of them at conferences.
However, I don’t know if the spending power of Nigerians in Nigeria is enough to keep a video game company afloat. I think maybe they should have focused on the international market, though they would have still failed because the international market is very sophisticated and probably would find Kuluya’s games too shallow.
Hopefully, the said quality titles are ‘Ghost’, ‘Phantom’, and ‘Shadow’? Else, it would be nice to know the names of those games. Who knows, I might have played 'em.
You brought up a very valid point with the size of the Nigerian market for games. If you look at a company like Gamsole, they’re based in Nigeria but I seriously doubt their market is in Nigeria.
@Bisong True! But if your are comparing Morroco and South Adrica with Nigeria, thats very wrong. They have much better solid backgrounds than us in game development. Ubisoft have a branch in Morocco that started way back as 2005 i think. Also most game programmers and artists from North Africa working in some Big studios are from Morocco. South Africa started their’s as far back as 1996. The only one I agree with you on is Cameroon; which as far as I know is still one gaming company. Thinking about it… We still can’t be compared, if you are comparing. Their recent game Aurion is like their 4th version. They had half baked previous versions way back as the early 2000’s, leaving them with still a better background that us. We started in 2011/2012, we are still babies in this industry. Mind you there’s also gaming company in Cape Verde
@Nwabu Okay, so how do we have the size to support it. No offence, but those two criteria determines the support and stability of an Industry. I remember South Africans complaining about this when their game development industry started out. Like I keep saying, no Angel Investor is prepared to spend a hefty amount of money on something that is not even a 50% chance of risk. So when Bissong said that cameroon was better that us which i agree only because of Kiroo Games, They got a massive amount of funding for their company, some goverment backing and a fund raising on kickstarter.
This startup was probably run down by what I call “Techcrunch management,” meaning that someone thinks they’re an expert in tech because they’ve read all about the western tech trends on foreign blogs and talked with some big shot foreign investors about matters technology. That is one of the fatal mistakes someone can make as an African investor or entrepreneur. Techcrunch will hardly ever write about Ringback Tunes or Sports Betting or bank system design and maintenance, yet we all know those are the areas where tech startups are “killing it” all across Africa.
I read articles about Kuluya and saw them talking about business models of Play Store, iTunes, IAP, bla bla bla. Meanwhile, Gamsole have cracked the African games market with a business model that’s very different from what you read in Techcrunch etc, that’s all I’ll say for now. For more information, Techcabal should do an in-depth interview with Abiola and post here.
@lordbanks You miss the point. the post was never about failure. It is given that around 70% of startups will fail, we have all failed several times.
I was only pointing out the irony of Jason’s earlier brash remarks and the fact that a supposed $2m startup was dead in short time. My focus was mostly on faulty valuations.
I like his new toned down response…No photos of wads of cash… no mentions of flying first class. no derogatory remarks. Big ups to @Jason_Igwe_Njoku
Heard of Fab.com, Zynga and Groupon? Yea. Shit happens. All with billion $ valuations,but crumbling now. Valuations in startups is mostly voodoo math. Discounted Cash Flow and all that.
Mark Suster is currently having a Snapchat session on this, in fact. Watch when you are free in 24H. Failure is not peculiar to Jason or his style. What he addressed however is our attitude to it. It should be to point out lessons, and update. Not for mockery. That’s all.
I really don’t know why you’re hung up on this. Valuations ultimately boil down to the price an investor is willing to pay for a company or thinks the company is worth (including other factors e.g. future revenue potential, partnerships, IP, DCFs, etc). Startups with no product or revenue could be valued at billions of dollars. Case in point, Magic Leap valued at $4.5 billion doesn’t even have a product out yet.
Loool. It’s fuh-gah-zzy. It just keeps going on, and on. Talk about Bezos he mentioned, he was mocked after his Fire phone flop. Bezos bragged. He wrote off the iPhone. It’s funny to watch now, in retrospect. Because Kindle was a huge success.
You just don’t know with these things and that’s why when some folks hit once, and make some fortune, they retire. Exceptions are the Musk, Levchin of this world with repeat success. It’s pretty hard to build/invent the future, which again I think one have to be very intentional about the business they build. Not just any shower idea.
Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people they can’t fail.
-Gates.
I re-read @Jason_Igwe_Njoku Kuluya’s $2m valuation post. You could tell he was pumped from IROKO success. Full energy. And that’s typical. Bezos thoughts because Kindle success, he could jump on phones. We know the rest. But he’s still balling. Jason too, I believe.
Jason: Movie :: Games
Bezos: Kindle :: Firephone.
But nor be so.
Talk about valuation, my friend @Hezeb had this long-winded, unsettled argument on tech companies high valuations. Today is $10B, 6 months later, it’s $50B. These figures are enough to make anyone lose their mind. Like where(the fuck) are these billions hidden?
Peter Thiel mentioned that while PayPal CEO, his DCF calculation projected that most of PayPal’s value was post 2015. Come 2015, PayPal is no longer cool. So how do capture value that have suddenly disappeared or eaten by the new cool guys?
Nice reply… But that’s where we are making the error… It’s two different economies…fairy dust does not exist in Africa. In Europe or America… Where the stock market is thriving and Information Technology is at an advanced stage… These startups can go public or be easily acquired by fortune 500 companies.
All based on user activity and projections…keep in mind Internet access and payments are seamless. Users can be easily converted to customers.
Zynga… Groupon… And Co… All went public and provided an exist for their investors… The samwer Bros made alot of cash from their Groupon investment. Etc. It’s nt exactly the same story.
Now in Nigeria u value ur company @ 2m dollars… No revenue structure… Nothng… No stock market… No exit. Just stories… Exaggerated figures and half truths.
Nigeria has the size to support it because we have a population of 100 million with mobile phones and who spend billions on phone calls. Mobile gaming is a no brainer in Nigeria but it has to be imaginative.
This is funny because most of the posts on this thread have tried to explore the reasons behind the failure, which is essentially a first and probably only step to learning from it. Of course the entire thread is going to seem negative - it is a discussion about failure.
The tone of his post is mostly driven by the fact that OP made a reference to his bullish defense of the investment years back. It’s what happens when a planet-sized ego senses vulnerability of any sort. Talk about a pot calling the kettle black.
Considering that Jason is a self proclaimed ‘poster boy’ for failed experiments - wastages in the name of startups - i wouldn’t consider his post entirely unsupported.
If he says he is the least shame faced Nigerian when it comes to talking about personal failures, most possibly he is.
However, he truly didn’t do this thread justice. There is a lot of material here, beyond conjectures as to why Kuluya failed. And it is not like Mobile Games were Blue sky experiment as at the time Spark invested in Kuluya, i believe there were already successful examples in Africa to learn from, so i’d say it was more a thoroughly failed project than an experiment.
Well Jason could afford it, so what the heck, right??
However, i must also add that there is a size of failure that isn’t worth embracing. The kind you don’t recover from. A smarter man once said never invest what you can’t afford to lose.
Lol, for your sins…there’s a 10’000 word post coming. Tomorrow.
BTW, why are Nigerians always too sensitive?
From OP that blasted from the comments section, which earned him a stinging article as response. OP’s ego was hurt so bad and decides to keep quiet. He’s silent for 2 yrs (something about revenge best served cold) and raisethe post ‘where’s Kuluya’ (in other words, time to eat your words). However, he’s beyond caring about what the OP (or others like him think in the ‘tech ecosystem’). So of course he reminds them how he was once doubted. His greatness, questioned by unbelievers ( never mind, that he could have well used his post to share unique insights and lessons learnt…but who cares,right?).
Who knows, maybe one day we will understand & see things in another light…
