Minhaz-Us-Salakeen Fahme
Game XR and SaaS Entrepreneur
There is a particular silence that follows shipping a game. You spend months inside it – arguing over a jump arc, redrawing a menu at 3 a.m., naming a boss after a friend. Then you release it and wait. The best sound is a stranger saying they stayed up all night playing it. The worst is finding it days later, cracked and free on a site you have never heard of the months of your life redistributed without a taka coming back.
Most Bangladeshi developers know both sounds. We have always been better at making than keeping. The numbers say this should be a golden age, over five million people playing competitively, esports an official sport since July 2025, the market growing past ten per cent a year, and a history to stand on going back to Dhaka Racing in 2003.
So why do we rank 61st of 100 nations in market value? Why did India go from 25 game studios to 250 in a decade while we counted ours on two hands? Because we built the talent and forgot to build the house it lives in.
Start with the most basic absence: not one Bangladeshi university teaches game development as a formal discipline. Not one. Every developer I know, myself included, learned the craft from YouTube tutorials and the stubbornness to fail in private until something worked. We produce talent the way a desert produces flowers: against the odds, never at scale. Finland built Angry Birds and Clash of Clans on real curricula, labs, and faculty. We send 50,000 computer science and fine-art graduates into the market each year with no-door marked “games” to walk through. The ones who fall for it anyway often leave, for safer software jobs, or other countries.
Then there is the theft. Roughly 90 per cent of business software here is pirated, and games inherit that culture of taking without paying. A studio pours months into a title and watches it get copied before it earns, so developers build only for foreigners, or stop building games at all. The road out was blocked too: banks do not understand a game as a business, so capital flows to outsourcing, and Google did not let Bangladeshi developers open Play Store accounts until 2017. We taught a generation that making things here is a way to get robbed politely.
None of this is a talent problem, our artists and programmers hold their own against anyone, anywhere. It is an architecture problem, and the fixes are known: game development as a real degree in five universities; IP enforced for digital work the way it is for medicine and garments; a national fund large enough to matter, run by people who understand the product; legal clarity on ratings, in-app purchases, and where esports ends and gambling begins; single-window clearance so foreign investment stops dying in queues; gaming named a priority sector, eligible for the incentives we already hand outsourcing.
I helped build this industry once, from nothing: no association, no meetups, no one to call. We started IGDA Bangladesh, ran the country’s largest game developer meetup, and made the talent appear. I even wrote what turned out to be the first game development book by a Bangladeshi author and didn’t know it was a first until months later. No one was keeping track, the missing half in a single fact.
Making the players was the first build, and the easy one. The house is the second: institutions patient enough to let talent stay, earn, and keep what it makes. We made the players. Now we build the part that lasts.
