Africa’s top social networking website LAGbook will early next year launch its online game development arm Naija Arts, as the site hopes to hit the one million subscriber mark.
According to Chidi and Chika Nwaogu, the LAGbook founders, Naija Arts is a brainchild of LAGbook’s chief financial officer Josh Osemwegie, and will focus on online game contents (HTML5) to be made available on LAGbook’s social discovery platform and the Naija Arts website using the HTML iframe technology.
Chidi told HumanIPO: “We want Naija Arts to be Africa’s equivalent of Miniclip. Initially we registered Naija Arts last year, and started working on Oleku, a 3D computer game for Windows.Oleku was to be a street (crime) life and survival game with features of famous locations in Nigeria. But the piracy issue in Nigeria became too disturbing.”
Chidi said they tried to create free trial versions but, due to piracy, they halted the development.
“We figured out that online gaming contents was the only way to prevent piracy. We’ll make money off the ads placed on the web pages in which the games are embedded on using the HTML iframe technology.”
“But then, we needed a huge traffic, and a ready database of potential gamers. So we decided to pour more energy into the growth of LAGbook, and introduce our online game contents once our user size is robust and impressive,” said Chika.
According to Chika, LAGbook is now what they have always wanted it to be; a fast growing social networking website, and this has rekindled our dream for Naija Arts.
Chika hopes that once LAGbook hits the one million member mark, which they aim to do in the early months of 2013, they will release Boko, a 3D adventure game based on the Boko Haram menace in Nigeria.
“We thought Nigerians want to play Boko, more than they would want a survival game like Oleku. So we will be debuting with Boko, and Oleku follows subsequently. Boko will be the first three dimensional computer game born out of Africa, and we’ll be blessed to break that record,” Chidi said.
LAGbook has entered into several partnerships in West Africa. The firm just this week entered into a partnership with Umuntu Media to make the Mimiboard App available for its over 400,000 members.
Earlier, the firm partnered with Blackberry, Dropbox, Dominion Comics and Social Learning Network Einztein to help engage its users with educational content.
“I’m glad to be a co-founder of this project. I intend contributing with early investments, and financial planning. I’ll be co-founder and CFO at Naija Arts, and you don’t know how much that means to me,” commented Josh Osemwegie, CFO at LAGbook, Inc.
