Gaming, Streaming and the Muslim Entertainment Market Nobody Planned For

Muslim-majority countries include some of the largest and fastest-growing gaming markets in the world. Indonesia has well over 100 million players. Türkiye, Egypt, Pakistan, Malaysia and Saudi Arabia all rank highly by player count, and the Gulf has among the highest per-player spending globally.

Saudi Arabia has gone considerably further than participating as a market. Through the Public Investment Fund and Savvy Games Group, it has taken substantial positions in major publishers, acquired studios outright, and made gaming an explicit pillar of national economic diversification.

Against that backdrop, the striking thing is how little deliberate thought the industry has given to Muslim players as an audience with specific requirements. The market has grown largely by accident.

The Monetisation Problem

The most consequential issue is structural, and it sits at the centre of how modern games make money.

Loot boxes and gacha mechanics, paying for a randomised reward, map closely onto maysir, the prohibition of gambling. The elements scholars identify are present: payment of a stake, an outcome determined by chance, and a prize of uncertain value. Multiple fatwa bodies and individual scholars have issued opinions against them, and several Muslim-majority jurisdictions have examined them under gambling law independently of religious argument.

This is not a peripheral design detail. Randomised monetisation drives a very large share of revenue in mobile and live-service games, which are precisely the categories dominant in these markets.

Related concerns compound it:

• Speculative trading of randomised items on secondary markets, which adds gharar, excessive uncertainty, to the maysir problem
• Real-money wagering in some competitive and fantasy formats
• Play-to-earn and NFT mechanics, which combine the difficulties of speculative assets with those of randomised rewards

Some publishers have adopted direct purchase alternatives, letting players buy the specific item rather than a chance at it, often for regulatory reasons in Belgium, the Netherlands or China rather than religious ones. The effect is the same, and it is the single clearest lever available for making a game commercially accessible to observant Muslim players.

Content Design and Regional Editing

Games are edited for Muslim-majority markets routinely, though the practice is rarely discussed publicly. Common adjustments include removing alcohol references, altering character clothing, removing religious iconography used decoratively, and adjusting depictions of prohibited practices.

Publishers generally treat this as unremarkable compliance work. Two problems recur.

Editing is reactive and inconsistent. Adjustments are typically made late, market by market, in response to a rating body or a distributor’s objection. The result is uneven, occasionally clumsy, and sometimes creates worse problems than it solves.

Representation is handled poorly. The recurring criticism from Muslim players is not about content restrictions at all; it is about how Muslim characters, settings and cultures are portrayed. Decades of games have used Middle Eastern and North African settings as generic conflict backdrops with interchangeable antagonists. Arabic text appears as decoration, frequently mirrored, misspelled, or lifted from religious material and used ornamentally in ways that give offence.

Studios that have engaged Muslim consultants during development, rather than editors after it, produce noticeably better outcomes on both axes, and avoid the expensive late-stage rework that reactive editing requires.

Streaming, Creators and Prayer Rhythms

The creator side of gaming has developed its own Muslim ecosystem with very little help from platforms.

Arabic-language gaming content is among the fastest-growing categories on YouTube and Twitch. Prominent Gulf and Levantine creators command audiences comparable to major Western streamers. Indonesian and Malaysian creators dominate regionally in their own languages.

Several patterns distinguish this ecosystem:

• Prayer breaks are normal and openly announced. Streams pause; audiences wait. Platforms have no product feature acknowledging this, and creators handle it manually.
• Ramadan transforms the schedule entirely. Streaming activity shifts to late night after taraweeh, and daytime engagement drops sharply. Ad-buying systems calibrated to Western diurnal patterns misfire badly for a full month.
• Community moderation norms differ. Successful Muslim creators typically maintain stricter standards around profanity and content than platform defaults, and enforce them consistently.
• Charitable fundraising is prominent, particularly during Ramadan, and often channels through zakat-eligible causes.

Brands buying creator inventory using generic regional targeting routinely miss all of this. The advertisers seeing the strongest results are those working with creators directly and building the calendar around the audience’s actual rhythms.

Saudi Capital and What Follows From It

Saudi investment changes the sector’s incentive structure in a way that has not fully played out.

The scale is substantial: significant stakes across major publishers, outright studio acquisitions, esports infrastructure, and a stated ambition to build domestic development capability rather than merely holding financial positions.

The commercially interesting question is what a publisher does when a major shareholder is a Muslim-majority state pursuing an explicit cultural agenda. Plausible consequences include greater investment in Arabic localisation as a first-class market rather than an afterthought, more original content set in Muslim cultural contexts developed with rather than about those cultures, and pressure, commercial rather than religious, toward monetisation models compatible with the region.

Whether this materialises is unresolved. Financial investment does not automatically produce creative influence, and the sector’s history of foreign capital acquiring studios without altering their output is long.

What Research Should Be Asking

Gaming is arguably the largest under-researched category in Islamic marketing scholarship. The literature is close to non-existent relative to the market’s size:

• How do observant Muslim players actually navigate randomised monetisation? Abstention, rationalisation, avoidance of specific games, or purchase without reflection are all plausible, and the distribution is unknown.
• What is the revenue effect of direct-purchase alternatives in these markets? Publishers have this data. None have published it, and it would settle whether ethical monetisation carries a commercial cost.
• Does representation quality measurably affect commercial performance in Muslim-majority markets, or is it a reputational issue only?
• How do Muslim parents mediate children’s gaming? Parental gatekeeping in this category is culturally specific and entirely unstudied.
• What would a game designed from Islamic ethical premises look like: not a religious educational product, but a mainstream commercial game whose economy avoided maysir and gharar by design?

That last question is the most generative. A great deal of Islamic marketing research examines how existing commercial forms can be made compliant. Rather less asks what those forms would look like if the ethics had shaped them from the beginning. Gaming (a young industry, with its economic models still visibly contested) is an unusually good place to ask it.