David Snook explores the many diverse amusement and gaming markets of Africa.
PUTTING your finger on to the identifiable trends in Africa and encapsulating them into a few words is nigh-on impossible. The world’s second most-populous continent has as many diverse ranges of games and gaming situations as there are separate countries within it.
What you have and where it is found is entirely dictated by economics. In the poorer countries of central Africa you will find games and gaming, but often poorly maintained examples on miniscule payment levels and of indeterminate age. You will find 50-year-old kiddie rides held together with string and home games consoles mounted into orange boxes; you will find ancient mechanical slots that should have been retired 40 years ago operating in establishments selling home brew.
You will also find isolated international-standard casinos, working with one of the very few official licences permitted in a country by the real adventurers among the global industry’s pioneers. You will also find carefully structured street markets in the better-organised and wealthier countries and some of the most modern and opulent family entertainment centres in densely populated areas.
The mix is so intertwined with complexities that it would take considerably more space than we have available here in order to lay it all out into identifiable order. Suffice to say that by the end of 2014, the African continent had more than 100,000 gaming machines ranging from what the industry calls AWPs up to casino slots. It also has a similar number of pure amusements, ranging from kiddie rides up to dedicated video games.
And in the past year there has been no single identifiable trend, apart from a natural organic growth.
The extremes of the continent are where the main action is based. South Africa in the south is structured, the Mediterranean coast in the north is similarly well ordered. Everything in between is pretty much a patchwork of the good down to the indifferent or simply non-existent as the priorities of existence take precedence.
But even in the more surprising places there are developments. Countries like Ivory Coast and Congo are seeing new FECs from Lebanese company Roberts, while the Dubai-based Leisure World is now running casinos into Cameroon, Liberia and Djibouti. These are the pioneers and they are by no means the only ones.
Read the full article in the February issue of InterGame
