John Ikpeme: We Can Break into the Billion-Dollar Gaming Market

Last November, John Ikpeme’s Dash Studios made a pitch ranked one of the top three pitches at the global games pitch, he told the GAMING WEEK team in a recent interview

What are social impact games all about?

We believe that games should bring people together rather than push them apart. Every technology should really do. So we focus on the integration of social games because we believe that games could be a tool for bringing people together, and we service in crazy amounts during the pandemic. So, people were at home locked in. There were different methods of communication people could choose from a lot. Millions of people chose gaming, and the gaming industry saw a growth during that period that it has never seen in quite some time. So it’s quite obvious that social games are the future and social games should be the focus.

How did you discover the gaming industry, and how long have you been operating? 

I played games for as long as I can remember. I remember my first console that my mother bought for me when I was eight, I think. And I’ve loved games ever since but I really went into the industry full focus in 2018. I am a data analyst/scientist by profession so I entered the games industry, not as a game developer or a programmer or an animator. I entered with a passion backed by data, and I wanted to make a change here and I realized that something was wrong. No African products or Nigerian products are selling on the global stage as other games are selling and I went around and asked a lot of founders and developers what was the hindrance? What was stopping us from doing what King does or Activision is doing? That was what led me and my cofounders to set up a studio with the sole aim of creating games that are commercially viable.

What was the feedback you got from those questions?

I can say one thing. They are extremely passionate about what they do. They love games. But the problem with the African or the Nigerian game industry at large is that we’re just a bunch of game developers. There’s a bunch of creative people. There is no business nature like studios. We don’t run game studios in Nigeria like an actual company. You need your books to keep it balanced in everything to make sense. You need to put data into consideration if you want to break into the different markets in Africa, Asia. There’s a lot of statistics that come into place. So that’s what the Nigerian gaming industry lacked. And then I saw that, of course, there’s a lack of funding, markets. I am still very bullish on the fact that if we build our studios, products and our companies in a way that is appealing to the global market slowly, but surely, we will break into the billion-dollar markets.

Would you say you are inching closer to that vision with your studio?

Well, we’ve been working on NOUNS. NOUNS is our debut game to the market.

When did you launch it?

 We started working on it last April and projected it to launch in January 2023. So since it was our first product, we cannot be naive. We wanted to test it on a lot of users. So far, we’ve had over 1000 testers in over 20 countries across the world, including USA, UK, Japan, Australia and other places. We’ve also attended global summits and events to try and grow the awareness because we did not want to launch blind and this led us to become top three pitches at the global games pitch in November. So it’s clear that African games can be loved everywhere in the world. And the feedback I’ve gotten from our testers in Japan has been incredible. And they love it and can’t wait for it to come on. So I can’t say that we are inching closer to a dream because the dream is just to be as good as our western counterparts are, millions of players every single day but we are on track.

Is there a particular cause attached to your games?

With NOUNS, we wanted to explore the educational part of the games. We noticed something as a trend in society that parents do not love children playing games, which is really against the entire point of it because children learn faster from games. It doesn’t have to be a controller, you know. These are little things they play around with on the floor. Those are games. Running around every day, those are games. So we are taking it to the platform that kids are much more attracted to nowadays, which are phones and laptops, and the rest of them. We’re trying to give them an opportunity to not just play games for the fun of it but also learn from it. That’s what NOUNS does, explore the concepts in single-player, multi-player, and storyboard, trying to get the players together and learn.

ADVISORY: +18 PERSONS UNDER 18 MUST NOT PARTICIPATE IN BETTING, GAMING OR LOTTERY ACTIVITY