Earlier this week, publisher Activision released “Destiny,” the most expensive video game of all time.
Costing a whopping $500 million to develop, update and promote, the science fiction role-playing game (RPG) was more expensive than most blockbuster films, including Avatar which cost just under a quarter of a million dollars to make, and The Avengers, which set the producers back by some $220 million.
But as remarkable as the game may be, it shares a trait with most, if not all, the other major video game hits that have emerged over the years, including the “Tom Clancy” first person shooters, the “Mass Effect” franchise, “Call of Duty,” “Grand Theft Auto,” “Tomb Raider,” “Assassin’s Creed,” “Uncharted” and countless others.
None of them are geared for the Arab audience.
The first thing that is glaringly obvious is the lack of Arab hero characters. As a matter of fact, more often than not Arabs and Islam tend to be portrayed as villains in stereotypical fashion, scaling them down to a few oversimplified caricatures. In fact, of all the lead characters that come to mind, Altair Ibn-La'Ahad of the first game in the Assassin’s Creed series, set in the Holy Land in the 13th century, was the only one remotely Arab. Even then, he was an assassin and an anti-hero.
Essentially, centuries of history and culture are reduced to nameless two-dimensional bots, or computer controlled opponents. In addition, games are not designed with cultural mores in mind. Issues such as skimpy attire, sex, alcohol and violence, all topics deemed inappropriate for general release in the majority of the Arab world, don’t seem to be a cause for concern during development.
To put it simply, the indication is that game developers don’t appear to be overly concerned about whether or not their product sells in this region. So why is that, considering the video game market in the Middle East, with a population of nearly 400 million, most of whom are under the age of 25, is worth up to $2.6 billion, according to Quirkat, a UAE-based game development firm?
In a nutshell, it all comes down to returns on investment.
Game developers are businesses, and their goal is to make as much money as possible. With a market as untapped as the Middle East, it would only make sense to gear products for that market.
Until, of course, the nature of the market is clarified.
Typically, purchasing a video game in cities such as Damascus, Beirut or Baghdad involves asking for a title, which is subsequently copied and placed in a plastic bag for the bargain price of $2 or less.
That has held true for most games of the PC-based variety, while Play Station 2 gamers could similarly find pretty much any game of their choosing for the same price.
And coming back to the example of “Destiny” mentioned earlier, investments of such massive scale to develop games for the region would make little business sense until copyrights laws are implemented and enforced.
Therefore, if any change in the dynamics of games geared for Arab consumption is to be expected, it will most likely have to come from regional developers, who to their credit have made great strides in recent years.
In fact, those in the industry who initially sought to produce content geared toward the Middle East gamer struggled to establish a foothold in the domestic market, particularly due to rampant piracy and a disorganized retail market. And the relatively few gamers in the region continued to look to Western titles for their gaming needs due to the perceived inferiority in the inferiority in the quality of locally developed alternatives.
Today, the regional game development industry has made great forays, with a number of companies that stand out among their peers. Yet even they face challenges that still require substantial effort to overcome.
In addition, language is another hurdle. While Arabic may be the prevailing language in the region, the dialects that make up the linguistic tapestry in the region are varied and plentiful, and adopting a localized formal Arabic would make the games sound labored and artificial.
There is also the matter of user interface. While Westerners are accustomed to reading from left to right, Arabic is read from right, which detracts from the general intuitiveness of the games’ features.
And finally, there is the visual cultural aspect, map styles that that are more familiar to the Arab gamer, including the ambiance, traditions and even subject matter.
In essence, to develop gaming for the Middle East, every nuance of the region must be recreated in digital form, just as it is done for their western and Far eastern counterparts.
