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Nyamakop: "There's demand for African-created content outside of the continent"
05.03.2024 - 09:45 / gamesindustry.biz
You can read all our South Africa Games Week articles on this page.
Nyamakop, arguably one of the most well known studios within South Africa, was founded in 2016, initially as a business endeavour to turn a university project into a commercial game, which became 2018's Semblance.
"We co-founded the studio with [Naughty Dog veteran] Judd Simantov, who's South African," CEO and creative director of Nyamakop, Ben Myres, tells GamesIndustry.biz. "He saw our final year project and was like, 'You should make this into a commercial project'. [Semblance] was the first African-developed IP on any Nintendo console ever. Since then, we've been working on our unannounced next project, which is very large and very tiring," he smiles.
The specifics of this mysterious title haven't been divulged, but Myres tells us a bit about the bigger picture.
"All I can really say is that it's an African-inspired game. Things like Black Panther coming out, also the success of Nollywood and Afrobeats… We even have an artist from South Africa, Tyla, who's 21 [and just won] a Grammy. It's showing that there's a lot of demand for African-created content outside of the continent.
"So Nyamakop's key strategy and goal right now is African-inspired games for a global audience, at as high a production value as we can make on the continent. We're doing a lot of things production value-wise that I don't think many people have tried to do on the continent before, and that's why it's taking so long."
Nyamakop bolstered its team for the project, with 30 people working on it. Part of associate producer Sithe Ncube's job is to manage that team.
"I'm learning so much, because this is my first full-time industry job," she says. "When I joined [Nyamakop in 2021], we were nine, and we've grown to 30. So I'm seeing people come in, and responsibilities change as the team grows larger, and there are certain things that you can't do with [bigger] teams.
"When I started out, I would be looking at what everyone was doing on a daily basis. Every morning, I would check people's task boards, and follow up on what everyone's doing. But with 30 people, you can't do that."
Nyamakop is based in Johannesburg and has a hybrid system of remote working with regular office days (the studio has 29 staff in South Africa, plus a few contractors throughout the continent).
"Because we're trying to create a more diverse games studio, it means we're not hiring people who have worked in games [before], because they're all white men, so we can't do it that way," Myres says. "So, we're hiring people out of related industries that have never shipped games before. But then if you've never shipped a game before and you're trying to make a very big game in an engine no one knows, at a
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