Unlocking Success in South Africa's Gaming Market: Engage, Secure and Thrive
Unlocking Success in South Africa's Thriving Gaming Market
As the world embraces digital transformation, South Africa's gaming industry is booming. The local gaming market is projected to generate USD 828.5 million in revenue by 2024, growing at a CAGR of 6.18% between 2024–2028. This growth is fuelled by a tech-savvy youth population and increasing urbanisation driving demand for engaging and secure gaming experiences.
To capitalise on this growth, gaming operators must focus on customer engagement. Engaging and retaining players through personalized experiences is crucial for long-term success. However, with increased engagement comes the need for robust, friction-right fraud prevention measures to protect players.
Effective identity verification is a must-have for gaming operators. Fraudsters can use botnets and zombies to perform distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS), steal data or send spam. In such cases, IP reputation evaluation becomes necessary.
Business impacts of fraud
Not only does fraud cause distress for users, gaming operators are also affected as it can lead to user attrition. A Kount survey showed a top reason gamers would stop playing a game indefinitely is if their accounts were hacked or stolen.
According Arkose labs, in 2021, 27% of all gaming traffic was malicious. And a study by Imperva in 2023 found the gaming industry suffered from the highest percentage (58.3%) of bad bot attacks. In April 2023, Interpol released a report giving South Africa the unwanted title of “Cybercrime Hub of Africa” as the country recorded over 230 million cybercrime incidents.
Fraud in online gaming can take several forms — some of the most common are:
Navigating regulations
Gaming operators, apart from ensuring their systems are fortified to detect fraud, must also comply with regulation standards that are challenging to navigate.
Gaming providers should assess a variety of parameters during a player’s journey: device risk (phone/email), ID verification, KYC, affordability checks, etc. This is often a tremendous resource drain for gaming companies as they must build and update their tech-stacks regularly to remain compliant with ever-evolving regulations.
The role of a well-designed onboarding solution
A seasoned solution provider like TransUnion can help by assisting in managing regulatory and compliance expectations and fraud detection/prevention measures, allowing you to focus on what matters most — producing and promoting compelling games.
Our data-driven solutions, fully compliant with South Africa's Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA), offer detailed insights to help businesses understand their customers better and create personalised experiences that drive engagement and build loyalty. We prioritise the security and privacy of consumer data, ensuring all personal information is processed and stored in accordance with the stringent requirements of POPIA.
Digital suite for gaming
The TransUnion digital suite for gaming is an end-to-end, channel-agnostic solution that helps operators acquire new players, better ensure more secure engagements and boost business growth.
It’s designed to detect and prevent specific gaming industry fraud, such as promotion abuse, while helping you manage regulatory and compliance expectations, enabling you to control who’s allowed on your platform by considering all key variables.
Here’s our player onboarding solution suite at a glance:
Managing the customer journey
TransUnion integrated solutions manage everything in the user journey from device risk assessment to authentication and access — all masterfully packaged into a single API with customisable workflow and orchestration.
TransUnion’s history as a leading credit bureau means we have proprietary data assets — globally as well as locally — which can be leveraged to ensure strong ID verification and fraud detection via device authentication and biometric capabilities when a user signs up on a platform and when they return.
Seamless security in real time
All these have been meticulously designed to help gaming operators provide a superior player experience — one that’s both secure and seamless. This helps increase conversions, retain players, assist in balancing and managing compliance expectations, and reduce fraud — thus fostering trust and loyalty. Expansion into international markets is also easy as the digital suite is available in multiple countries.
For businesses wanting to optimise the entire customer lifecycle from acquisition to onboarding to account management — while balancing compliance expectations and fraud prevention — our solutions suite and hands-on expertise can give you a more competitive edge.
Contact TransUnion to learn how we can help your business thrive in a dynamic digital economy.
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