Rabat Gaming City aims to attract the world's leading video game business leaders

As part of the Morocco E-Sport Summit, held in 2022, the creation of the Gaming City in the capital Rabat was announced. This video game production and marketing city will be located in the Yaacoub Mansour municipality near the Madinat Al Irfane student district. The complex will cover an area of five hectares and will be well connected to public transport. 

Among the various initiatives launched in recent years by the Ministry of Youth, Culture and Communication in partnership with the Royal Moroccan Federation of Electronic Games (FRMJE), the Rabat Gaming City project aims to create an electronic gaming ecosystem in Morocco in order to boost the video game industry in the country and open up to international partners specialised in this thriving economic market.

After having initiated, in 2021, the project to develop an Economic Acceleration Zone (ZAE) dedicated to gaming and the film industry, by the former Minister of Culture Othman El Ferdaous, the consulting agency Etic Consult in charge of the study of the creation of the Gaming City studied the fact of transforming the area into a high-level gaming complex. The objective is to strategically position the area to have a positive impact in terms of added value and employment generation. 

The Rabat project involves several economic actors and government institutions such as the Ministry of Youth, Culture and Communication, the Ministry of Digital Transition and Administration Reform, the Rabat-Salé-Kenitra Regional Investment Centre and the Moroccan Agency for Development and Investment and Exports (AMDIE) working in continuous partnership with private sector decision-makers. 

This new project reflects Morocco's desire to become a video game producing country, in order to follow the global trend in this field. Considering the great advantage of the North African country, which consists of its current demographic context made up of a young majority, Morocco enjoys favourable conditions that enable it to take advantage of this fast-growing market and to open up horizons that explore new professions such as programming and artificial intelligence among others. 

The development of the Gaming City will be carried out in three phases and will include three areas with a reception area, an open space, offices for supervisors and consultants, meeting and training rooms, restaurants and technical premises. The area will also offer external services, with a clinic, training facilities and a hotel planned.

The gaming complex project, which aims to develop the video games sector in Morocco, will establish a fruitful partnership between the public and private sectors. Thus, the private partners will advocate to place Morocco in the best position worldwide, while the public partnership will ensure an advantageous macroeconomic context for the development of this sector. 

During a visit to Morocco to learn about investment opportunities in the sector, Young Mok Park, CEO of Proxy Planet, a Korean company and world leader in the gaming and e-sports industries, met in October 2023 with Medhi Bensaïd, Minister of Youth, Culture and Communication, and Mohcine Jazouli, Minister Delegate in charge of Investment, to discuss the potential of the sector in Morocco, in particular the "Rabat Gaming City" project.  

During this meeting, the Moroccan officials presented to the South Korean director Morocco's strategy in the field of the video games industry, as well as the actions carried out by the Ministry to develop and promote this industry. These initiatives have so far made it possible to provide public youth centres with spaces dedicated to electronic games, as well as to create spaces for coding and innovation. 

It should be recalled that the new Investment Charter provides significant support to projects operating in the cultural and creative industries sector, which generate jobs for future professions, such as gaming professions, a promising sector for several countries in the world. 

In this sense, Morocco aspires to be an African leader in the field of e-sport and video games development, being aware that Gaming is a sector that knows a strong progress and a growing demand especially among young people who represent a divine treasure of the country as a consumer and a difficult challenge to overcome as a workforce at the tail end of unemployment.