A subscription model for online gaming can combat piracy in the gaming segment as the sector gains increasing importance in the region.
With a large number of gaming products being translated into Arabic and a large chunk of the population belonging to the 18 to 25 age group, the region has become a good business platform for game developers and vendors.
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, a business portal, has an online subscription model for its gaming division and has also developed its own payment model. The portal also has a focus on research, blogs and women’s issues, and its popular souq.com is an established player in the region.
The business portal’s alternative online payment method for its website is called Cash u.
Sriram Sharma, product manager at Cash u, said: “The online payment model started in 2002 as an alternative to credit cards and the growth came from teenagers who did not have access to credit cards. Even the penetration of credit cards was low in many parts of the Middle East. We have partnerships with retail establishments and with resellers. Therefore, the card is bought, scratched and just refilled. Now we have tie-ups with at least 150 online gaming merchants.”
With such an online payment model in place, it becomes difficult to break gaming codes on multiplayer games played online. “In single player browser-based games it is possible to crack codes but a subscription model helps control this as they follow a payment method. Users pay at least $10 (Dh36) a month to play these games and this helps combat piracy to a large extent. For all the effort put in by game developers, you need a model like this to support them,” said Sharma.
‘Travian’, an online browser-based multi-player strategy game, has been one of the most popular ones on MaktoobMaktoob
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, which supports at least 30 languages, including Arabic. The website launched the Arabic version seven months ago and has at least a million users using Cash.
Sharma says, multiplayer online gamers get access to all features by using its e-commerce platform and the company has had its largest growth – 60 per cent – from this segment.
Martin Waldenstrom, general manager at Cash u, said: “The largest number of users on the site are Arabs and when MaktoobMaktoob
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games started it was only for casual gamers with four to five million users per month. This ranged from Morocco to Iran, and soon we realised there was huge potential. Now we are speaking to game developers across the world and even local Arabic game developers. International gaming companies are investing into translating games for the market. This helps the user base get big and with the interesting demographic here it makes a lot of business sense.
Online users have an option of using credit cards but the younger population does not have access to these credit instruments. The Cash u card does not need documentation like credit cards.
“In online payments in the region, there is competition from ‘One card’ based in Saudi Arabia, who work more with ISPs. When we started with Cash u it was used more for web hosting and helping online commerce in the region, as there was a lot of untapped business potential in the online space. If you have not formed a company, you can still sell your services as the processes are made easier,” Waldenstrom said.
