Why Africa needs its own distribution rails

I spent the better part of 2024 explaining the same thing to investors, friendly skeptics and a few cultural ministers: Africa does not have a games problem. Africa has a distribution problem. Every studio I know on the continent can ship something good. None of them can reach the player two cities away without giving up most of their margin to a platform that was never designed for them.

The standard answer is "use Steam." Steam is wonderful — for the geographies it was built for. It assumes a credit card, a postal address that maps to a clean tax jurisdiction, and a payout flow that does not collapse the moment local FX gets exotic. Strip those assumptions and you discover that the storefront we treat as universal is, in fact, deeply regional.

The numbers nobody quotes

In the markets we operate in, fewer than one in five gamers can complete a Steam checkout without help. Most of them never try a second time. The studios I incubate in Dakar and Cotonou see 70–90% of their sales come from off-platform: direct download links, WhatsApp groups, mobile-money invoices manually generated by an intern who is also doing community management.

You cannot build a sustainable creative economy on rails you do not own and that were not built for you.

That is the thesis behind Oloroun, and it is the reason the European Union backed it with €500,000 in 2025. Not because PC games are a strategic priority for Brussels, but because the alternative — a continent of creators permanently routed through somebody else's payment processor — is a kind of soft infrastructure colonialism that nobody is comfortable signing off on once you say it out loud.

What we are actually building

• A storefront that speaks mobile money first, card second.
• Developer payouts in local currency, with a settlement layer that does not lose 7% to a chain of correspondent banks.
• A regional CDN so that downloading a 4 GB game in Cotonou does not cost more than the game itself.
• A creator dashboard built in the languages people actually run their studios in.

None of this is sexy. None of it ships in a trailer. But it is the layer underneath every shipped game in 2030, and somebody has to build it. We decided that somebody might as well be us.

If you are a studio thinking about distribution and you are not yet in the Oloroun pilot, the door is open. The point of building rails is that they carry more than your own trains.