All Work and No Play

Hi 👋🏾 Lawrence Gado here!

Remember the popular saying “all work and no play…”? 

Well, it’s 2026, and the lines between play and work are starting to blur.

There are 349 million gamers in Africa, and 90% of them play on mobile.

But for many of them, it’s no longer just a pastime; it’s work.

In Nigeria, gamers earn anywhere from ₦8,000 ($5.5) daily on the low end to $1,655 a month on the high end.

And if you grew up on Sega cartridges, weekend marathons of Mortal Kombat, or borrowing the family PC to play GTA: Vice City, then gaming was probably the same thing for you that it was for me.

A beloved hobby, yes, but never a career. 

But to understand how this shift happened, we need to revisit…

The OG games of Africa

Long before consoles and mobile devices arrived, games in Africa often revolved around shared physical games.

Children used to hide Ludo boards in their bags to play during breaks, and after school, they gathered to play Ludo, Mancala (Oware), or Morabaraba. 

Stones, sticks, and homemade boards weren’t just toys; they taught strategy, skill, and teamwork.

Adults also had their own games, like Draft (also called Checkers), or Ngoro, which required advanced strategy, deeper tactical thinking, and interpersonal intelligence. 

Then came the mid-2000s, and the personal computing revolution that swept the world finally reached many homes in Africa.

By 2004, Nigeria had 7 computers per 1,000 people, and by 2008, companies like Omatek and Zinox Technologies were assembling computers that sold for as little as ₦45,000 ($380 in 2008/$33 in 2026).

In Kenya, traders started selling imported PCs for as low as $65.

This meant that a new crop of games entered everyday life. Road Rash, GTA: Vice City, and Virtua Cop.

But this shift didn’t stop with PCs. 

Soon, devices like the Sega Genesis, Game Boy, and PSP grew popular, and introduced many teenagers to titles like Contra and Battle City.

By the early 2010s, three tailwinds came together in a perfect storm, and they changed the way gaming worked in Africa forever.

Let’s go play online

If you were an African teenager in 2012, three big changes were unfolding before you:

• You saw new, cheap smartphones were popping up everywhere. Models like Tecno P5 were common.

• The Internet was getting cheaper and faster. You could buy data for as little as ₦200 ($1.25 in 2012/$0.15 in 2026).

• And all your friends were jamming out in chat rooms on WhatsApp and 2go.

In a world like this, what it meant was that young people could play more sophisticated games. And they did.

Games like Killer Bean, Modern Combat, and Call of Duty.

These were multiplayer games, so you could connect with people you’d never met over 20-minute games.

The result: mobile gaming boomed in Africa.

By 2015, Africa had 77 million gamers. 

By 2021, it hit 186 million. 

And by 2024, we had 349 million gamers.

What’s interesting is that along the way, communities started springing up around these games.

Sometimes, it was groups of friends passionate about games teaming up in cafes to compete with other groups.

Other times, they were university communities (often known as guilds).

These groups taught each other tricks, built gaming profiles, competed in tournaments, and won prizes together. 

Organizations like the African Cyber Gaming League (ACGL) and Mettlestate created a structure.

They set up standardized leagues, ranking systems, and tournaments across mobile, console, and PC.

Over the last decade, a huge gaming market has spun up locally.

Today, Africa generates $1.8 billion from gaming, with 87% of that driven by mobile. 

And the continent’s gaming market is growing six times faster than the global average.

Nigeria alone contributes $300 million and 42 million players, making it one of the biggest gaming countries in Africa.

With all this, you might think gaming remained “just a game”. Fun, yes, but separate from work.

But that’s no longer the case. Because today…

Gaming is serious business

As gaming grew in Africa, another phenomenon grew globally. 

It’s called Play-to-earn, or P2E for short.

And it came from the most unlikely of places: crypto.

See, one of the biggest problems in crypto is finding real-world use cases for it beyond payment.

In 2021, gaming became an answer.

That year, a crypto startup released a game called Axie Infinity, which rewarded players with crypto tokens as they played.

The more users signed up to play the game, the more valuable the tokens got, and the more money the players stood to make.

Soon, gaming guilds in Africa caught on to this. They started training young people to play the game en masse and make money.

Games like Axie Infinity require players to buy expensive artifacts in the game to get a chance to play.

So, many gaming guilds like Afriguild and Metaverse Magna would recruit skilled gamers, then cover the cost of these artifacts. 

They’d then lease these artifacts to the players who’d play the game and win more tokens. 

These players, often called scholars, earned anywhere from $100 to $300 a month. For the first time, gaming became a job. One that could pay you in forex.

When the 2021 crypto boom cooled off, gamers on the continent had smelt potential and knew the truth: gaming is serious business.

Games like Fortnite and Call of Duty exploded even more in popularity.

And they’ve turned into spectator products.

• In South Africa, the African Cyber Gaming League organizes Fortnite tournaments with prize pools as high as R10,000 ($630) per person. 

• In 2024, Carry1st, a game distribution startup, organized the Africa Cup 2024 for Call of Duty Mobile, with a $15,000 prize pool across 5 countries. And it drew millions of viewers.

In Nigeria, Call of Duty Mobile (CODM) does physical ads to drive more people to play and join tournaments.

And it’s working.

In late 2024, there were 11,200 active CODM players in Nigeria. By late 2025, it had grown to 200,000 active players.

That’s a ~20x jump in one year.

Now, Activision, the makers of CODM, are building a local server in Africa to handle all the traffic.

The coolest part of it all is…

Gaming is a real job now

If you grew up in Africa, you know the drift.

There’s a handful of “good” career options open to you, and that’s it. You can be a lawyer, an engineer, or a doctor. Or at least something close to these three.

But today, many young Africans are building careers in areas no one would’ve seen as “work” just a few years ago. 

Like Ayere Victor Ehinome, also known as Manja Lee.

Victor trained as an accountant in college and got a job as an auditor.

For him, gaming was simply a pastime and nothing more. 

Until his roommate advised him to start posting videos of his gameplay online. 

One video went viral, then another, and another.

In 2021, Victor decided to go all in on gaming and build an online audience while at it.

Today, he has over 500,000 followers across TikTok and Instagram. Some are hardcore gamers themselves, while others simply enjoy the spectacle.

In 2023, he was named Nigeria’s Best Call of Duty Mobile Content Creator. 

Sponsorships and brand deals followed, and as you can expect, money came too.

Manja soon left his auditing job to focus on creating gaming content full-time.

Today, he’s a TikTok Top Creator in Gaming,  a title reserved for the biggest influencers.

His story isn’t exceptional because it’s rare, but because it’s increasingly replicable.

Africa has a new job market

You’ve likely heard a lot about Africa’s booming youth population, set to hit 1 billion in the next 10 years.

And much has been said about how digital skills could be the solution to an impending jobs crisis in Africa.

Young people are now learning to code, design, and build products for the rest of the world.

And in the future, there’ll be a bulge of young Africans working and earning globally from the continent.

But gaming is hardly ever seen as a part of that gospel. And seeing the numbers, it should be. Because young people aren’t just learning to code, they’re also learning to game.

And they’re doing so more organically than ever.

Africa’s job market looks different now. It’s no longer all work. 

There’s some play involved now. A lot of it, in fact.

What do you think about the rise of gaming as a career in Africa?

Let us know here.

This article was contributed to Tech Safari by Lawrence Gado, a lawyer based in Lagos, Nigeria, who uses socio-cultural norms to explore the human and business impact of tech in Africa.

That’s it for this week. See you on Sunday for This Week in African Tech. 

Cheers,

The Tech Safari Team

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