Video games in Nigeria: what Nigerians play, on which phones, on how much data

Ask a Nigerian gamer what they play on and the answer is usually in their hand. Consoles and gaming PCs exist, and the people who own them are serious about it, but most Nigerian gaming happens on a phone, in short sessions, on a mobile data bundle somebody is watching closely. This guide puts numbers on that: how big the market is, what phones people use, how they get online, and what kind of game fits.

All the figures here come from the sources listed at the bottom, with their dates. Numbers like these move quickly, so treat them as a snapshot at the time of writing, October 2026.

How big is gaming in Nigeria?

BusinessDay, citing PwC’s Africa Entertainment and Media Outlook 2025-2029, reported that Nigeria’s gaming market made about $176 million in revenue in 2024, with a projected annual growth rate of 7.4% to 2029, the highest of Nigeria, South Africa and Kenya. The same report says the wider Nigerian video game market is expected to reach $1.3 billion by 2028, with mobile games making up more than $1 billion of that, and esports about $20 million.

The Federal Ministry of Art, Culture and the Creative Economy has included video gaming in its growth strategy, according to the same report. For a country whose films and music already travel the world, games are the next obvious export.

Which phones do Nigerians game on?

In plain English: about three in four web visits in Nigeria come from a phone, and more than four in five of those phones run Android. iPhones are a minority. Tablets barely register.

For players that means a few things. Games built for iPhone first, or for powerful new phones, leave most Nigerians out. Storage matters, because a phone full of WhatsApp videos does not have room for a 3 GB download. And a game that runs on a phone that is a few years old reaches far more people than one that needs this year’s flagship.

How do Nigerians get online?

According to DataReportal’s Digital 2025 report for Nigeria, at the start of 2025:

• Nigeria had about 235 million people.
• About 107 million of them used the internet, 45.4% of the population. That still left more than half the country offline.
• There were about 150 million mobile connections. Some of these are voice or SMS only.
• The median mobile download speed was about 18.9 Mbps, down from a year earlier. The median fixed connection was about 22.4 Mbps.

Most Nigerian players are on mobile data, not home broadband. Data is bought in bundles, and the price of a bundle changes often, so we have not quoted one here: check your own network’s current plans. What does not change is the habit it creates: when every megabyte is paid for, you soon learn which games eat data and which do not.

What do Nigerians play?

Games everyone already knows

The most-played games in Nigeria are often the ones that were played on tables first. A 2026 feature in Leadership newspaper called the Ludo King app the most popular family game in Nigeria, because almost any phone can run it and almost everyone knows the rules. Whot, the card game Nigerians treat as their own, has a whole shelf of apps, Maliyo Games’ Whot King among them. See our guides to Naija Ludo rules and how to play Whot.

Games made at home

Nigerian studios make games for this exact audience: phone-first, light, and full of Lagos. Maliyo Games made Disney Iwájú: Rising Chef, tied to the Disney+ series set in a future Lagos. ChopUp made Danfo, a racer about Lagos commuter buses. Gamsole made Gidi Run, an endless runner through Lagos streets. Kucheza Gaming made The Wild Kingdoms, an adventure built on Yoruba mythology. Our full list is in Nigerian video games, and the people behind them are in Nigerian game developers.

Consoles and PCs

Consoles have a long history in Nigeria. Back in 2013, Polygon reported that the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 were reasonably popular there, that Xbox Live was not available in Nigeria and that piracy was common. We could not find a recent, reliable count of consoles in Nigeria, but the phone and web figures above make it clear where most Nigerian gaming happens.

What this means for a game

If you were designing a game for Nigerian players from scratch, the numbers above would tell you to:

• build it for Android phones first, and make it work on older ones;
• keep the download small, or skip the download altogether;
• respect the data bundle, so the game does not eat it;
• make it work on a slower connection, not just on fast Wi-Fi;
• and make it feel like home.

How AJ Cities tries to fit

That list is more or less how we build AJ Cities, a free open-world game set on the edge of Ajegunle, Lagos. It runs in the phone’s browser, so there is no app to download and no storage to clear. It was designed phone first, with touch controls, and it is built to start on older browsers, back to Chrome 87 on Android and Safari on iOS 15. Performance on slow, low-data connections comes first in how the game is built: frame rate, download size and network traffic are weighed in every change.

It is set in a fictional estate on a Lagos street, with a single-player story about AJ, a man deported from London, and a live estate where adults meet other players. If you have questions about phones, data or anything else, the FAQ has short answers.

How big is the gaming market in Nigeria?

BusinessDay, citing PwC, reported about $176 million in gaming revenue in Nigeria in 2024, with the video game market expected to reach $1.3 billion by 2028, mostly mobile.

What phones do most Nigerians game on?

Android phones. StatCounter put Android at about 84% of mobile web traffic in Nigeria in September 2026, against about 16% for iOS.

How many Nigerians are online?

About 107 million at the start of 2025, 45.4% of the population, according to DataReportal.

Does AJ Cities use a lot of data?

It is built with low-data connections in mind: it runs in the browser with nothing to install, and download size and network traffic are weighed in every change.