Technology

Into the Wild plays with the idea that managing a game farm can be a game in itself.

Born and raised in Soweto, Raymond Ledwaba is a chartered accountant and MBA graduate who left a well-paying job at Absa to make video games. The story goes back to 2015 when he started an NPO called Diski Nine9 that used soccer and netball to empower young people. When the pandemic hit, Ledwaba couldn’t run the soccer or netball programmes, so he pivoted to eSports and ran an online FIFA tournament. “We had all these young kids playing and I thought, why are they not playing a game made in Africa?” Ledwaba, who is also the CEO of consultancy ITTHYNK Smart Solutions, then went down the eSports rabbit hole. “I was disappointed,” he says. “I learned that less than 1% of video games around the world are developed by Africans. And, naively, I decided to make African games.”

He created ITTHYNK Gaming, with the aim of building Africa’s largest and most influential game IP, but the more he investigated the industry, the more he realised how many challenges and obstacles there were.