Nigerian Startup Launches Abula App — And Wants to Make It the Next Global eSport

On a quiet street in Ibadan, an elderly man named Chief Olatunji Adeyemi teaches his grandchildren how to move seeds across a wooden board. The game is Abula — and inside a Lagos tech hub three kilometres away, developers are racing to put the same game on smartphones.

The contrast captures Nigeria's bid to transform its oldest traditional games into a modern industry worth potentially $50 million.

From Village Squares to Silicon Valley

Abula has been played across Yorubaland for at least 500 years. Two players compete by sowing seeds into pits, capturing opponents' pieces through mathematical calculation and foresight. Families in Abeokuta, Ijebu, and Ondo have passed the rules down through generations.

What changed in 2024 was money. Lagos-based startup Heritage Games raised $2.3 million in seed funding from Nairobi-based African Technology Ventures to build a digital platform for indigenous African games. Their flagship product: a smartphone version of Abula launching in March 2025.

"We watched how chess became a global phenomenon," said Adaeze Okonkwo, Heritage Games' 31-year-old co-founder. "Abula has deeper strategic complexity. The question was never whether it could compete — it was whether anyone would build the infrastructure to try."

Why Nigeria Is Betting on Cultural Exports

The Nigerian gaming market generated approximately $45 million in 2023, according to data from Statista. Most of that came from foreign titles — FIFA, Call of Duty, Fortnite. The government's new Creative Industry Finance Initiative wants to flip that equation by backing homegrown intellectual property.

Under the programme, Heritage Games received a $180,000 grant from the Federal Ministry of Culture to train 50 game designers in Abuja over six months. The ministry declined to comment on whether additional companies would receive similar support.

The logic runs like this: Nigeria already exports music, film, and fashion. Traditional games represent an untapped category with zero licensing costs and deep cultural resonance that resonates with the 45 million Yoruba speakers worldwide.

Community Fears and Hopes

Not everyone welcomes the digital shift. In Abeokuta, the traditional Abula players' guild — local men who gather daily at the Ogunrinde market — worry that screens will replace face-to-face competition. Their concern is legitimate: studies on other traditional games show digitisation reduces physical community gatherings by up to 30 percent within five years.

Chief Adeyemi, 74, sits beneath a mango tree near the guild's regular spot. "My father taught me the rhythms of this game," he said. "How do you put that on a phone?"

Heritage Games' response is a hybrid model. Their app includes an offline mode that tracks local tournaments and encourages meetups. They also built a system where physical Abula boards can connect to the app, recording moves for ranked play.

The eSports Question

Heritage Games is planning a national Abula championship in Lagos in June 2025. The prize pool is 5 million naira — modest by global eSports standards, but the largest ever assembled for an indigenous African game. The company projects 200,000 monthly active users by the end of next year.

If those numbers hold, international platforms will start paying attention. Twitch, the streaming platform popular with gamers, has already approached Heritage Games about broadcasting rights, according to Okonkwo.

That would position Abula alongside South Africa's esports scene and Kenya's mobile gaming sector as an African competitor in a global market valued at $1.8 billion in 2024.

What Happens Next

The March launch will determine whether Nigerian enthusiasm translates to downloads. Heritage Games needs 100,000 users in the first three months to justify a Series A funding round, which would value the company at roughly $15 million, according to investor projections.

For communities like Abeokuta's guild, the stakes go beyond economics. Chief Adeyemi's grandsons use the app to play opponents in Canada and Germany — strangers who discovered the game through Instagram. That same reach could, their grandfather hopes, bring new players back to the physical boards when they visit Nigeria.

"The tree is still here," Adeyemi said, tapping the wooden board. "The phone is just a different branch."