Peak Games Moves Toward MENA, Acquires Saudi Social Games Giant Kammelna

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Wael Nabbout
Feb 21 2012
Games
Peak Games Moves Toward MENA, Acquires Saudi Social Games Giant Kammelna
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“We have added Kammelna to the Peak Games family because of their profound understanding of MENA players and their focus on creating culturally relevant, multiplayer social games - where Peak already has expertise with millions of users” - Sidar Sahin, CEO and founder of Peak Games.

Peak Games, the fastest‐growing emerging markets games company in the world, further cemented the its leadership in two of the world’s largest emerging markets, Turkey and Middle East North Africa, by acquiring Saudi social games giant Kammelna Games. The collection of Kammelna’s games support and fulfill Peak’s promise to offer the most culturally relevant games across the region.

"Peak Games is capitalizing on a growing market opportunity in Turkey and MENA, and has been able to successfully exploit its first mover advantage and deliver culturally relevant games, vaulting it to the #4 position on the list of the world's largest social games companies,” said Michael Pachter, Managing Director Equity Research of Wedbush Securities. “The company's strategy is paying off, as the region has one of the highest levels of user engagement and average revenue per user (ARPU) in the world."

Peak’s audience has been growing rapidly, topping 20M monthly active users (MAU) and 7M daily active users (DAU), after a 25 percent increase in less than 4 months.  Peak’s games are played in 5 time zones, 4 continents and 5 languages.

The new acquisition brings the popular Middle Eastern card game Baloot into Peak’s growing lineup of top performing multiplayer synchronous game titles, which include Okey, Okey Plus, 101 Plus and published titles such as Happy Farm (المزرعة السعيدة).

Peak’s focus with the Kammelna acquisition will be to provide Baloot on new platforms, including Facebook and mobile, and launch new titles across multiple platforms.  The company will continue to launch more Arabic card, board and table-top games through the new studio.

Happy Farm is the second most popular social farm game in the world, a top 15 Facebook game globally, and has more than a third of Farmville’s numbers even as an Arabic-only property. 

MENA web and technology luminary and Kammelna founder Essam Alzamel will run Peak Games’ new studio in Damman, KSA.  Adding to its office in Amman, Jordan, Kammelna takes Peak’s footprint into Saudi Arabia, extending beyond other Gulf coast countries on the Arabian Peninsula, including Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. 

MENA growth is projected to reach 400M players by 2015 and has a highly engaged social gaming community.  In Saudi Arabia specifically, more than two-thirds of Internet users play games online, one of the highest engagement rates globally.  Currently, the Saudi Arabian region has one of the highest ARPU in social gaming around the world.  Kammelna users alone average more than one hour in playtime.