Background

About 30.8% of games released on Steam in 2026 carry an AI-generated content disclosure, up from 10.9% in 2024, according to an analysis of 53,597 releases by game executive Sulka Haro.

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Worth Knowing

Saintoon Studios' Pata Pata, a snakes and ladders style board game with African tourist sites, was shown at Apps World in San Francisco in 2014.

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Worth Knowing

A third-party catalogue of video games tied to Zimbabwe lists only five titles, three of them from one Harare company.

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Worth Knowing

Makasa Cards, a mobile version of the card game many Zimbabweans grew up playing, had more than 1,000 downloads on Google Play in September 2026.

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Making a game has never been cheaper. Tools can now draw the art, write the code and plan the project in minutes, and the numbers show it: about one in three new Steam releases in 2026 discloses AI use. So where are the Zimbabwean games? We went looking, and what we found is a thin trail, not a flood.

The case that this should be easy now

On Steam, 10.9% of 2024 releases disclosed AI-generated content, according to Sulka Haro's analysis of 53,597 games, reported by GamesRadar. That rose to 19.9% in 2025 and 30.8% in 2026. A separate academic study of Steam found that more new independent developers arrived after generative AI went public than earlier trends predicted. Haro's conclusion is a warning, though: most of these are small productions that struggle to succeed, and "almost none of them make money."

Two caveats matter. Steam's disclosure covers AI-made content that ships in the game, such as art, sound and writing, so it does not capture a developer who simply used an AI assistant to help with code. And the data is from Steam, a PC store, while most African players are on phones.

What we found

Our search is not a census. It leans on English-language coverage and developer posts, and some games will have slipped past us. Even so, it turned up around 20 Zimbabwean-made titles over 13 years, one of them still unreleased. A third-party catalogue of games tied to Zimbabwe lists just five.

We cannot say how many used AI, because none of our sources say. The one clue is Techzim's September 2026 review of Makasa Cards, whose writer says he played it to check whether it was "vibecoded AI slop" or something that really works, and concluded it works. The recent wave of young, solo developers, such as an 18-year-old who says he wrote more than 25,000 lines of code for a browser game in a few months, is consistent with cheaper tools, but that is not proof.

So where are the games?

The honest answer is that code was never the main wall.

Getting paid. Techzim reported in 2017, in a profile of developer Gerald Gombiro, that Google had not opened merchant accounts in Zimbabwe, so most local developers rely on in-app ads. A 2021 grant proposal repeats the point.

Getting trained and funded. DW reported in 2024 that most African countries have no games degree courses, so developers teach themselves, and that there is no state funding. The 2025 Africa Games Industry Report found only 3% of surveyed developers had ever received government funding.

Getting played. Haro found the top 1% of Steam games take about 94% of estimated revenue. Cheaper making does not make being found any easier. At home, data costs still decide who plays.

Getting finished. Kurhwa, announced in 2017, has had development pending since 2022, according to its lead writer. TechVillage's accelerator drew 21 finished games in four weeks, its founder said in 2019, but he also said it had never launched one itself.

AI changes the cost of making, not the cost of being paid, found or played. That is why Zimbabwe is still waiting for its breakout.

A field guide to what exists

2013 to 2017.

  • Pata Pata and the Saintoon games. Harare's Saintoon Studios made a free board game for up to four players with cave-painting avatars and a board of African tourist sites, according to Windows Central. An App Store listing mirror gives its first release as 19 December 2013. Techzim reported in 2015 that Apple had featured it and that Saintoon had made five iOS games, including Piggy Back Ride, Fruit Faces, Bug Smasher and No One Death.
  • Chihuta Bird Game. Ishmael Chibvuri's 2016 Android platformer about the quail craze, with a Princo Spice track, Techzim reported.
  • Babu. Gerald Gombiro, a NUST computer science graduate in Kwekwe, released this free Android game in 2017, in which you keep a flying monkey in the air to collect bananas.
  • Kurhwa. A free-to-play multiplayer combat game announced in 2017 by the Comexposed community. Lead writer Eugene Mapondera described it in 2023 as a MOBA with the whole team levelling up together and tuck-shops on the map, and as not yet released.

Shona and Ndebele games.

  • NatiV. Ian Mutamiri's apps teaching children to read Shona include Vaka Manzwi, a Scrabble game, according to a 2015 profile. He won US$10,000 in seed funding in 2013.
  • Manzwi and Neno. Brighton Mukorera's Shona word puzzle, followed by a word search in Shona, Ndebele, Zulu and Swahili, built in Unity, per Built In Africa.
  • WAPASA. An animated Shona game for Grade 1 pupils, developed in 2021, according to an academic study.

Cards, cooking and a bridge.

  • Afro Eights. A card game launched on Android and iOS in June 2020 by a team that included UK-based surgeon Robert Maweni, per the Daily News. The rest of that report is paywalled.
  • Epic Tales. Kudakwashe Muchirahondo's cooking game, on Steam for a one-off fee, started in 2020, according to Venture Nation Africa.
  • Return to Zimbabwe. Keith Nereyemhuka describes in his own account a 2025 game teaching financial literacy. That description is the developer's, not an independent review.

2025 and 2026.

  • Catch Em Things. Kudakwashe Mazikana's reflex arcade game on mobile and PC, with no adverts or paywalls, per his own announcement. The catalogue also lists Evolution Cars: Selekta Events and MAGNETIC from the same Harare company, which we have not verified.
  • Cheetah Hunt. Benjamin Nkomo's Android survival game from Kwekwe, launched in November 2025, per his own posts.
  • Path of Light. MaxMass's free, text-based life simulation on itch.io, built with Phaser.
  • Makasa Cards. Tendai Karuma's mobile version of the school card game, with 269 Google Play reviews at a 4.7 rating, according to Techzim.

What to watch

The tools are not the bottleneck any more, which means the next Zimbabwean hit is more likely to come down to payments, publishing and players. For now the games that last are small, local and free. For competitive play, see our look at the state of esports at home. If you know a Zimbabwean game that belongs on this list, tell us.

Sources

Researched and drafted with the help of AI tools, then fact-checked and edited by our team. How we work.

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Rufaro