Limpho Moeti: Collaboration is key to South Africa's future in games

07.03.2024 - 13:13 / gamesindustry.biz

You can read all our South Africa Games Week articles on this page.

Limpho Moeti has been in the South African games industry for almost eight years, starting out at Free Lives and working her way up as she fell in love with the industry and with production, she tells GamesIndustry.biz.

She helped create and run Cape Town-based games event Playtopia as deputy festival director for almost five years, then moved on to Semblance developer Nyamakop (whom we talked to earlier this week) to do production and business development for over three years, as the studio grew from three people to roughly 25.

Since January 2023, she's been business development manager at consulting agency RocketRide Games, which aims at guiding studios through their development cycle and help connect them with funding sources.

"We work a lot with developers who are in emerging markets, so South America, South-East Asia, here in Africa, and we have clients from all over the world," Moeti explains.

She continues: "We're very much an agency that tries to help both with creative direction, executive production, as well as marketing. So it really is the kind of support from before pre-production until post-day-one launch. And I love that. I think that if we have to do a capitalism, we can do one where it's never win/lose, but win/win, and always doing what is best for the developer, and ensuring that we're growing in a sustainable way."

Through the years, in addition to her production and operations work, Moeti has also been very involved in the South African community, organising game jams, speaking at events, doing panels. We covered one of her talks back in 2020, about lessons learnt from business development in Africa.

"It's something that I'm deeply passionate about, particularly with a focus on growing industries, creating a sustainable, long-term industry, and one that is representative of the country, that is representative of all of the different kinds of people who consume and enjoy games [and] should also be able to make games," she adds.

With her career and current position, Moeti has been in a privileged position to witness the growth of the South African games industry over the past few years.

"The number one [strength] for me is just the immense talent that is here, and how more and more studios are getting funding," she says. "It's becoming easier, to a degree, to do services-type work, game development, mobile, PC, console. There is a lot more focus and a lot more information coming out both from South Africa and the continent in terms of the market that's available, and the developers. You can study game design. There's more discussion and focus on production, on business development, on games as a career, which I think is