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Muarrab

Market overview

What the Arabic-speaking games market actually is.

Most market decks for this region repeat the same handful of numbers without saying where they came from. This page does the opposite: every figure is attributed to the organisation that produced it, with its year, and the claims we could not verify are listed at the bottom rather than dropped.

See who has shipped Arabic Developer resources

The three markets to know

Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Egypt

These three are measured together as MENA-3, and they are where a language decision is usually tested first. They are not one market: they differ by an order of magnitude in what a player is worth.

  • $2.0B

    Combined games revenue across the three countries in 2024.

    Niko Partners, 2025

  • +5.4%

    Year-on-year growth, with the forecast at $2.2B for 2025 and $2.8B by 2029.

    Niko Partners, 2025

  • 72M

    Players at the end of 2024, forecast to reach 84.3M by 2029.

    Niko Partners, 2025

  • $84.60

    Annual games revenue per player in the UAE — the highest of the three.

    Niko Partners, 2025

  • $54.89

    Annual games revenue per player in Saudi Arabia.

    Niko Partners, 2025

  • $3.39

    Annual games revenue per player in Egypt. Reach and revenue are very different things here.

    Niko Partners, 2025

  • 23.5M

    Active gamers in Saudi Arabia alone.

    GAMR, 2025 Media Sector Report

Revenue per player, not player count, is the figure that decides whether a language return is real. Egypt and the UAE sit at opposite ends of it.

The wider region

Beyond MENA-3

Measured across the whole Middle East the numbers are much larger — and measured differently. These are a different geography in a different year and are never added to the figures above.

  • ~$4.0B

    Games revenue across the wider Middle East in 2023.

    Analysys Mason, 2024

  • ~380M

    Players across the region — roughly 65% of its population.

    Analysys Mason, 2024

  • ~12%

    Projected compound annual growth to 2028, reaching roughly $6.9B.

    Analysys Mason, 2024

  • ~40% / ~15%

    Saudi Arabia's and the UAE's share of the regional market.

    Analysys Mason, 2024

How they play

Mostly mobile, but not only mobile

The regional revenue mix leans hard to mobile. That is a reason to localise your mobile title first — not a reason to skip a console or PC release that already exists.

  • ~80%

    Share of regional games revenue from mobile.

    Analysys Mason, 2024

  • ~10%

    Share from PC.

    Analysys Mason, 2024

  • ~10%

    Share from console.

    Analysys Mason, 2024

  • 1.69%

    Share of worldwide Steam downloads originating from 22 Arab countries — against Turkey's 1.80% and Korea's 1.79%.

    Valve, Steam download telemetry

What they want

They ask for Arabic, and mostly do not get it

This is the gap the rest of this site is about: demand is measurably present, support is measurably absent.

  • 45%

    Of players in Saudi Arabia say they play in Arabic or prefer to.

    Regional player research

  • 41%

    The same figure across the Gulf.

    Regional player research

  • 7.8%

    Of Steam's 6,387 best-selling games support Arabic.

    Steam store filters, 27 Sep 2026

  • 0.00%

    Arabic's share in Steam's own language survey, which is the list many developers pick languages from.

    Steam Hardware & Software Survey

State backing

This is a funded priority, not a hobby market

Regional governments are putting public money behind games and esports. That shapes what buyers expect from a release in their market.

  • $70M+

    Prize pool at the Esports World Cup 2025 in Riyadh.

    Esports World Cup, 2025

  • 3M+

    Visitors to the same event, across 25 tournaments and 218 clubs.

    Esports World Cup, 2025

  • 340M

    Hours watched.

    Esports World Cup, 2025

  • 4.2B SAR

    Projected Saudi games market by 2027.

    GAMR, 2025 Media Sector Report

  • 250

    Gaming companies targeted in Saudi Arabia by 2030.

    GAMR, 2025 Media Sector Report

  • 39K

    Jobs targeted by the same programme.

    GAMR, 2025 Media Sector Report

Why the gap persists

A loop that keeps Arabic off the language list

The low support figure is not evidence that nobody wants Arabic. It is the output of a cycle in which nobody measures the demand, so nobody funds it.

  1. 01

    A game ships without an Arabic-language client.

  2. 02

    Steam's own language survey therefore records Arabic at 0.00%.

  3. 03

    Developers choose their language lists from that survey.

  4. 04

    So Arabic is not on the list for the next release either.

Sourcing discipline

What we could not verify

These claims circulate widely in this market. We are not repeating them, and we would rather tell you why than quietly leave them out.

  • A national gaming commitment in the tens of billions of dollars, widely repeated in press coverage.

    We could not trace it to a primary government or sovereign-fund publication, so it does not appear on this site.

  • Any figure for the size of the Arabic localization industry itself.

    No primary source exists that we could find. The catalog on this site is our own measurement instead.

  • Player counts for individual Arabic-speaking markets outside Saudi Arabia.

    Not available to us at the same standard as the figures above.

On method

  • MENA-3 (Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt) and wider-Middle-East figures describe different geographies in different years. They are not additive, and this site never adds them together.
  • Language-support percentages are a share of one specific set of 6,387 best-selling games on one platform — not of all games everywhere.
  • Revenue per player is not the same measurement as market size, and a large player base with low revenue per player carries a different return than a small one with high revenue.
  • Where a figure is cited to a compilation rather than to the research organisation that produced it, the compilation is named instead of implying a primary source.

Sources

  1. Arabic is supported by 7.8% of Steam's best-selling games; Korean reaches 49.9%. Steam's own store search filters, across 6,387 top-selling games, dated 27 Sep 2026. Source ↗
  2. MENA-3 revenue, player counts and revenue per player. Niko Partners, 2025 MENA Gamer Behavior & Market Insights, reported by PocketGamer.biz on 15 July 2025. Source ↗
  3. Wider Middle East market size, player population, platform split and growth. Analysys Mason, 20 August 2024. Source ↗
  4. Saudi market size projection, company and job targets. General Authority of Media Regulation, 2025 Media Sector Report, cited by playinarabic.com. Source ↗
  5. Gulf and Saudi player language preference. Regional player research and market surveys across GCC countries.
  6. Arab world ranks #13 of 239 in Steam global downloads (1.69%), ahead of Australia and Spain. Valve Steam Download Traffic by Country, archived 27 Sep 2024. Source ↗
  7. 72 million gamers across Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Egypt exceed 7 European countries combined. Niko Partners (2024 MENA-3 Report) and Video Games Europe (2023 European country demographics). Source ↗
  8. PlayStation Arabic localization commercial impact on game and console sales. Jim Ryan (CEO/Global Sales, Sony Interactive Entertainment), IGN Middle East interview, 2016. Source ↗

Catalog counts, voice coverage, team, genre and platform tallies — computed from Muarrab's own index on 2026-09-29. Page visits from Google Analytics (G-FVF8XZWNYQ). This page currently indexes 307 documented localizations.