People love to be entertained. From bankers to bus drivers, everyone enjoys a moment or two of escapism. And as people grow increasingly attached to their mobile phones, they become more interested in mobile entertainment. This entertainment is available at any time, anywhere, fuelling the growing appetite worldwide for increasingly sophisticated and socially-minded mobile games. Recent data out of Juniper Research forecasted that by 2017, 64 billion games will be downloaded onto smartphones and tablet devices. This is over three times that of 2012, which saw roughly 21 billion downloads. Jupiter attributes the massive growth to the increasing number of free-to-play releases and the worldwide uptake of smartphones.

Locally, mobile phone users are no less addicted to the hits of dopamine that come from reaching the next level of Moonbase (a locally developed mobile game), but the growth of the South African market is inhibited by a number of factors. For one, South Africa is a largely prepaid cellphone market, which makes it a tricky task for developers and distributors to create sustainable revenue streams. Another factor is the ubiquity of feature phones as opposed to smartphones, and the complex question of distribution.