The BLAST Pro Series CS:Go global final – a two-day esports tournament bringing together the world’s best players of the enormously popular multiplayer first-person shooter video game - kicks off today in the Kingdom of Bahrain. It is the latest in a series of major gaming tournaments taking place across the MENA region where the still largely untapped billion-dollar gaming market is growing twice as fast as the global average. And yet, with Arabic gamers increasingly clamouring for more content in their own language, the enormously popular event is shining a spotlight on the so called “MENA Gaming Gap”.
The MENA region is home to the world's most active gaming community – a market set to triple in size to $4.4 billion by 2022. At 25% year-on-year growth, it is the fastest growing online gaming population in the world (compared to 13.9% in Latin America, 9.2% in the Asia Pacific, four per cent in North America and 4.8% in Western Europe). Gaming revenues in the GCC alone stood at more than a billion dollars in 2016 and that number has continued to grow. Some 30% of the GCC population play digital games, and gamers aged 18-24 (50% of MENA’s population are under 25) are spending an average of eight hours per week on consoles.
However, few game developers and publishers localise their content - with less than three per cent of content available online in Arabic, according to Internet World Stats 2019. By sheer numbers, Arabic is one of the top five languages spoken globally, with more than 400 million speakers in MENA alone. Furthermore, at $181, MENA’s average revenue per user is amongst the highest in the world - compared to just $48 in China.
Mohamed Al Khalifa, Senior Manager, Business Development - ICT, Bahrain Economic Development Board said, “The fast-growing Arab gaming market remains undersaturated, and Bahrain is an ideal regional base for game developers, with its highly educated workforce and cost competitive environment that boasts some of the world’s fastest connection speeds.”
Robbie Douek, CEO of BLAST Pro Series, said, “The enormous popularity of gaming and esports across MENA shows no sign of slowing, and Bahrain has a vibrant tech scene and can be a real driver of game localisation on the edge of the region’s biggest gaming market. It’s hard to think of a more fitting venue for BLAST Pro Series CS:Go global final.”
Bahrain’s flexible, pioneering and pro-tech approach to business is already attracting big names in gaming. Gaming industry mega-phenomenon Fortnite has recently switched its server location for the whole of the Middle East to Bahrain, following Amazon Web Services launching the Middle East’s first hyperscale datacentre in the Kingdom. Ideal test market conditions are created by a flexible regulatory system, the rollout of commercial 5G and an ever-strengthening tech ecosystem - with the Kingdom ranked first in the MENA region for ICT readiness by the World Economic Forum.