On 1 October, a Nigerian developer named Shalom Rayhamen released a life-simulation game called Lagos Life. It was built in eight hours overnight, using Anthropic’s AI models to assist with research and coding. Within nine days, Rayhamen said the game had attracted more than 4.7 million players and generated over $170,000 in earned and contracted revenue. The company behind it, Vatar Inc., raised $500,000 in angel funding at a $10 million valuation, with backing from Flutterwave chief executive Olugbenga Agboola and other prominent Nigerian technology founders.

The game’s success set off a wave of imitation. Developers across Lagos, Abuja, Ibadan and Port Harcourt began shipping their own browser-based simulations, most of them variations on a theme: everyday Nigerian life, rendered playable. There was Naija Hustle, Mama Put Rush, Danfo Run, PH Lifestyle, Surviving Nigeria, Lagos Tycoon. On X, the links circulated for a day and then disappeared into the timeline.

One person decided to collect them. Marvellous Nwachukwu is a front-end engineer who builds web applications in React and TypeScript, currently for BrainDAO, the organisation behind the IQ AI ecosystem, where he has worked on products that blend decentralised finance with artificial intelligence. He is studying software engineering at Miva Open University, and before that spent four years building interfaces for technology companies in Warsaw, Málaga and New York. He is also, by his own account, a keen gamer — which is why he noticed the games at all. On 1 October he launched Oya Jam, a free, no-download, no-account directory of Nigerian browser games, with a weekly chart of what people actually play. In an interview with Launch Base Africa, he described the logic with disarming candour. The games were real, but the links were fragile. “I might remember the game, but I do not know where to go,” he said. Oya Jam was built to solve a filing problem. What it has become is something closer to a census.

That census is partial, and Nwachukwu says so. “There are so many things going on; you’re bound to miss a lot,” he said. He estimates coverage at “more than 50 per cent” of Nigerian browser games, but declines to put an exact figure on it. The platform listed 191 games at launch, 131 of them Nigerian. By the second week of its chart, 29 games had registered enough plays to rank.

The chart tells a story that the viral conversation does not. In its first recorded week (5–11 October), Lagos Life topped the table with 166 plays. Across 22 ranked games, the total was 700 plays. The following week (12–18 October), Naija Farm, a simulation by Ajayi Feyikemi Mabel, exploded to 1,463 plays, driving the total to 2,070 across 29 games. Lagos Life fell to fifth, with 48 plays. Fifteen games were new to the chart. The Ghanaian Dream, a non-Nigerian game, made the biggest climb, up seven places.

The week-on-week data reveals a market that is volatile, imitative and extremely early. Naija Farm now accounts for roughly 70 per cent of all plays recorded on Oya Jam in the last seven days. Remove it, and the platform’s remaining 24 ranked games shared fewer than 600 plays between them. The long tail is not a tail; it is a scattering.

“Many games, even Lagos Life, have gone viral, but they mostly gather between 5,000 to 8,000 plays on my platform,” Nwachukwu said. “For some games we have a consistent or gradual incline. For some we have a deep decline. For some, the chart tops on certain days of the week and is low on others.” He added: “I haven’t put much time into analysing the metrics of various games, but overall I know the shooters, 3D games, more of those games — they’re not getting as much attention. Simulations do well.”

That admission matters, because the metrics are the only independent data available. The headline numbers that made Lagos Life famous — 4.7 million players, $170,000 in revenue — are self-reported by the developer and have not been independently verified. Oya Jam cannot confirm them. Lagos Life predated the platform, so its plays are not tracked. “In order to do something like that, we have to speculate,” Nwachukwu said. 

The revenue question is the one that hangs over the entire scene. Lagos Life has found a model that works, at least for now: it sells advertising space on virtual billboards inside the game. One report counted 244 advertisements across 40 virtual billboards in Lagos, Port Harcourt and Abuja, worth roughly $45,870 in a single week at the disclosed rate of ₦250,000 ($188) per advertisement per week. The model is clever because it sells the same virtual space to multiple advertisers and monetises the cultural specificity of the game — the danfo buses, the power generators, the recognisable Lagos locations.

But it is not clear that the model is replicable. Most of the other games on Oya Jam have no advertising inventory, no premium currency and no revenue. Nwachukwu said monetisation is difficult even for established studios. “That’s why you see them having aggressive models — premium currency, skins, premium content,” he said. “In Lagos Life you have certain vehicles you could get with currency, real naira. I don’t know if I’d recommend that; I don’t know if people would actually like it.”

The broader Nigerian market is not small. The country’s gaming market was estimated at $844 million in 2025 and is projected to reach $1.24 billion by 2032, growing at a compound annual rate of 5.6 per cent. Africa’s gaming market generated more than $2.29 billion in revenue in 2025, with Nigeria contributing an estimated $300 million, behind Egypt but ahead of South Africa and Kenya. Mobile gaming accounts for nearly 87 per cent of gaming activity across the continent.

Those figures, however, are dominated by iGaming and betting, not by the browser-based simulations that have captured attention in recent weeks. The creative end of the market has historically struggled to attract capital.“Running the business side of game development is where most of us struggle,” Prince John, the developer behind Maze Runner, said in a recent interview. “There isn’t enough guidance on monetisation. You have to figure it out on your own. There aren’t many companies buying games from Nigerian developers — especially locally.” Yemi Johnson, co-founder of Nigerian casual-games company Hyper, put the economics bluntly: “If developers spend $0.5 to acquire a gamer, then they need to show you >$0.5 worth of ads. At a CPM of $10 per thousand views, it means they need to show you 50 ads just to break even”.

The Lagos Life advertising model sidesteps that problem by selling space to businesses rather than attention to advertisers. But it depends on scale, and scale depends on retention. The Oya Jam data suggest retention is weak. Lagos Life lost more than 70 per cent of its plays between week one and week two. Naija Farm surged, but its staying power is unknown. The platform’s all-time chart, since 5 October, shows Naija Farm at 1,463 plays, Naija Hustle at 369 and Mama Put Rush at 256. After the top five, the numbers fall away sharply.

The audience, where it can be measured, is overwhelmingly mobile. Nwachukwu said 73 per cent of Oya Jam’s visitors — about 2,900 of roughly 3,400 at the time of the interview — played on a phone, against 26 per cent on a computer. That has implications for developers. “Many of the game developers should optimise for mobile first,” he said.

What the data cannot say is where the players are. Oya Jam does not collect location data. Nwachukwu said he avoids it for privacy reasons. He assumes the audience is Nigerian, because the developers are Nigerian and they promote their games to Nigerian audiences on X. But that is an assumption, not a measurement. The diaspora question — whether this is a local market or a nostalgia market — remains open.

The question of what is driving the boom is easier to answer. Nwachukwu is blunt: it is hype, imitation and the low barrier to entry. “I saw a game simulating Lagos go viral, so I think I should make an Ibadan-simulating game as well,” he said. “I think that’s the driving force.” Of the makers, he said: “Some are profiled as crypto content people, and then they just launched a game. So it is a fad, just like people are creating crypto coins.”

He does not exempt his own game from that description. Mama Put Rush, which he built, is a Nigerian adaptation of the popular Western game Cooking Fever. It sits fourth on the all-time Oya Jam chart. “I just wanted to push out something as well,” he said.

The platform itself is not a business. “It’s something for fun and passion for now,” Nwachukwu said. “It’s not really a business.” He keeps infrastructure costs close to zero deliberately, so that it remains sustainable. There is no advertising, no revenue model, no plan for one.

That may be the most honest description of the scene as a whole. The games are real, the attention is real, and the cultural energy is real. But the market, in any commercial sense, is not yet. Lagos Life has a revenue model and a valuation. Almost everything else has a link that works for a day.

The venture capital that has arrived is thin and recent. Beyond Vatar’s $500,000 round, the known funding events are small. Google Play has launched a $1 million equity-free fund for African indie developers, and Supercell has recently offered grants of up to $200,000. But these are grants, not venture bets, and they do not change the underlying economics of free-to-play browser games.

The question for the ecosystem is whether the current wave produces anything durable. Nwachukwu thinks the answer depends on the developers. “It depends on industry growth, on standards — will developers try to improve their games, will they continue to be good?” he said. “And will investors see the patterns and decide to fund growth?” He compared the trajectory to the long tail of global game franchises: an initial rise, a gradual decline, and then a sequel that brings the audience back. “We’re going to have similar patterns with Nigerian games,” he said.

But the sequel requires capital, and capital requires evidence of a market. The evidence so far is a single game with a single advertising model and a set of self-reported numbers. The rest is a chart that changes every week, a founder who says he is not running a business, and a directory that makes no claim to completeness.

“You’re bound to miss a lot,” Nwachukwu said. He was talking about the games. He might also have been describing the answer. 

Sidebar: The fortnight in numbers

Source:Oya Jam’s weekly charts. Plays are counted as one person playing on a given day. The charts offer a bird’s-eye view of the pulse of Nigeria’s chaotic gaming scene.

The audience: 73% mobile, 26% desktop. Roughly 2,000 direct visitors, 1,000 from X, 400 from Google. Location data is not collected.

The money: Lagos Life claims $170,000 in earned and contracted revenue, mostly from virtual billboard advertising. Vatar raised $500,000 at a $10 million valuation. No other game on the Oya Jam chart has a disclosed revenue model.