The world's fastest-growing games market still can't read the menu

MENA will spend a record $7.1bn on games this year. We audited 312 major releases and found barely a third ship working Arabic.

n the third floor of a Riyadh office tower, eleven testers spend their days doing work most global publishers still treat as optional: reading a video game, in Arabic, one screen at a time.

The region they serve is no longer a rounding error. MENA will spend a record $7.1bn on games in 2026, growing faster than any market on earth. Yet of the 312 major releases we audited over eighteen months, only 109 shipped with Arabic that works — menus that render, subtitles that keep pace, text that runs right-to-left without breaking.

The rest fall somewhere between neglect and accident. We found flagship titles whose Arabic characters display detached and backwards, day-one patches that quietly delete the language, and one open-world blockbuster whose translated tutorial instructs players to "press the door".

"Studios will spend four years modelling sand — and four weeks on the language of 400 million people."

The excuses have a pattern. Text engines built for left-to-right scripts. Fonts licensed without Arabic glyphs. Bidirectional layout bugs filed as "low priority — cosmetic". And underneath them, a cost myth: a full professional subtitle pass for a 40-hour game costs less than a single CGI trailer.

Something is shifting anyway. Regional money now sits on publisher boards. Sony runs a localization hub out of Riyadh; three of the testers on that third floor were hired from our own community forums. Two publishers told us Arabic support is being added post-launch wherever GCC refund rates spike — the market, in the end, invoices for its own neglect.

The players were always here. The spending was always here. What has changed is that someone is finally counting — and publishing the count. The menu, at least, should read.

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