My career has been spent building gaming and digital communities. Following senior roles at SEGA Europe and SEGA West, today, I lead WOLF, a MENA-focused social entertainment platform and technology business with expertise in building highly engaged online communities.
My experience has taught me that the gaming app market has grown into a big business opportunity, especially for social platforms. It’s the largest segment of the global gaming industry, accounting for more than50% of total gaming industry revenue with an audience of around three billion players.
The mobile gaming market is expanding annually by more than 10%, driven by smartphone accessibility, the free-to-play model, and the rise of in-app advertising and brand partnerships.
While social platforms have historically focused on content consumption, there is now a clear shift toward participation. And we’ve listened and reacted to that and as a result; since launching WOLF Qanawat six years ago, we have welcomed more than four million users into the app. New-user acquisition is also strengthening, driven in part by smaller creators and influencers bringing highly engaged communities into our games.
When games became the social glue for WOLF Qanawat
Integrating games into the WOLF Qanawat app has led to millions of in-app plays and strong adoption among new users. This shows how integrated, low-friction games are emerging as a powerful way to drive engagement, retention and community growth.
It all began with WOLF Qanawat’s Gaming Hub which launched in the middle of 2025 as an add-on to a live audio app used by Arabic-speaking users across MENA. It has since grown into one of the app’s main features, cutting user churn from 27% to 17% and bringing in 66,500 new users through games alone, leading to 3.66m in-app gaming sessions by February 2026.
In the WOLF Qanawat app we have integrated heavily gamified, multi-player experiences that act as natural social icebreakers directly within our audio channels. A major part of this strategy leans into our core expertise: facilitating large-scale, team-based activities. We enable macro-level community competitions, designing experiences where entire channels and established mini-communities can compete against each other for ultimate bragging rights. This creates an incredibly powerful layer of tribal loyalty and organic retention that drives engagement and is unique to WOLF Qanawat.
Shared play experiences and a sense of belonging replace the need for likes and comments
WOLF Qanawat is the premier live audio entertainment and social networking platform tailored specifically for the Arabic-speaking digital community in the MENA region. We have seen first hand how casual, social-first games (think quick, familiar formats rather than complex titles) are outperforming traditional engagement tools because they replace passive consumption and rigid tasks with low-friction, rewarding human interaction.
In the social and mobile spaces, long-term retention relies on a sense of belonging. For WOLF Qanawat, live audio content gets users through the door, but interactive gaming anchors them into real friendship groups. We specifically designed our system so that when a game session ends, players are deposited right back into a highly social area of the WOLF Qanawat community.
This gaming model is particularly effective during cultural and live moments (e.g. cultural celebrations, major sporting events) as it taps into existing interest in the offline world. That’s why our game selection process is entirely driven by cultural relevance and social mechanics. We look for multiplayer games that naturally foster friendly banter, competition, and connection. This is precisely why we launched with Carrom. It has massive cultural significance in the Middle East and is often played during social gatherings and Ramadan.
We deliberately design or adapt experiences requiring two to four players to ensure interaction is high. Sitting on top of WOLF Qanawat, our Unity-powered games plug into a foundation layer that provides seamless integration with all of WOLF Qanawat’s backend microservices. This deliberate design gives users an immediate off-ramp into deeper conversations and relationship-building. Once a user establishes a regular gaming circle on the platform, they cease to be a passive observer – they become an active part of the community, which dramatically lowers churn. Thus it is clear to see how you can build communities around games.
What play means for the future of social
I believe that the convergence of gaming and social platforms points to a broader shift in how people will spend time online. Social platforms have traditionally competed for attention through feeds, likes, comments and content. Games offer something different. They are a reason to participate, interact and return.
For social platforms, this creates an opportunity to move beyond passive engagement and build experiences where users actively contribute to the community around them. The most successful platforms of the future may not be those that simply keep people scrolling, but those that give them compelling reasons to play, connect and belong.
For games publishers, the opportunity is equally significant. The traditional boundaries between a “game” and a “social experience” are becoming increasingly blurred. Games no longer need to exist as standalone destinations; they can become social layers within larger communities, reaching new audiences and creating new routes to discovery and engagement.
This also changes how we should think about product-market fit in gaming. The winning experiences may not necessarily be the most complex or technically ambitious. They will be the ones that understand why people want to play together, and remove as much friction as possible between discovering a game and sharing that experience with others.
The opportunity is not simply to put more games into social platforms. It is to rethink what social platforms can become when play is at their centre.
The scroll may have defined the first generation of social media. I believe play could define the next.
Gary Knight
Gary Knight is CEO of WOLF. An executive leader within the entertainment and technology sector, Gary has specific experience in games and the gamification of social network communities. Earlier in his career, Gary helped grow SEGA Europe, before he was promoted to CMO for SEGA West, where he was responsible for all brands experiences across Europe and North America. He also worked with EA Games managing the global marketing division for its FIFA game.
