Nigeria’s Kuluya Games has introduced an SMS in-app payment option allowing players to buy items via SMS.
Lakunle Ogungbamila, chief executive officer (CEO) of Kuluya Games, told HumanIPO the integration is operator-driven.
“Basically it’s operator-driven, meaning game players can buy items with SMS. The way we have integrated it is that once a player decides to buy fuel for let’s say our Keke Game, the app asks them for permission to send an SMS on their behalf, and if they click “yes”, an SMS is sent and they are rewarded with whatever they want to buy. It allows inner purchases with SMS,” he said.
He said there is no fixed price to be charged on each transaction.
“It depends on the item – there is NGN30, NGN50 and NGN100. It depends on the item a player is buying. The way to observe it is you get to buy virtual coins with the SMS. If the item you want to buy costs about 20,000 virtual coins you send an SMS to buy 20,000 virtual coins with NGN20 and you get to use it to buy the item,” Ogungbamila said.
“Individuals can also get the virtual coins by playing the game long enough in recognition of virtual achievements in the game.”
Through the solution, he said the company is experimenting new ways of generating revenues from the games.
“This is one of our tests to see what we can get out of our games. In-house purchases constitute about 50 per cent of revenues generated from mobile games. It’s proper that we set out our revenue strategy at this time,” he said.
“We have decided that apart from inner purchases via SMS, we have set up an exclusive ad link across all our games. What it means is that as long as people play our games, we can access them with ads. We have already tested that with one of our games. The more downloads we get, the more people we can reach with advertising.”
On the current status of gaming in Nigeria, he said the company is optimistic about the industry.
“We have not figured it out 100 per cent but we can see light at the end of the tunnel. From what we’ve been doing we can see it is promising. We’ve seen lots of engagements, download and interests of the public. It is a multi-billion dollar industry. We are not there yet, but we are very close,” he said.
He urged game developers to work on producing unique contents.
“We should focus on bringing out more great contents that are unique and competitive on the global scene. Our biggest downloads come from China and Russia, which shows you how competitive our games are. We have Chinese companies reaching out to us that they love what we are doing and are coming to us with partnership inquiries. Our story lines are very new and our games are very competitive internationally.”
