We spoke with Anas AlSahli, the CEO and co-founder of Qwacks, the Saudi gametech company building a unified technology layer for game development.
He founded Qwacks in 2024 after years inside the regional gaming ecosystem — including time at Steer Studios and involvement in acceleration programs such as Game Changers and Game Founders — where he repeatedly saw strong creative talent held back by gaps in technology, production, and go-to-market.
Qwacks is his answer to that execution gap: software infrastructure that lets studios focus on building fun while Qwacks handles backend, playtesting, and market intelligence.
In December 2025, he led the company through a SAR 1.8M ($480K) pre-seed round backed by Merak Capital.
We spoke about Qwack’s origins, its goals, what it solves for companies, and its future.
Qwacks aims to help developers build games more efficiently and sustainably. Can you take us back to the beginning? How did the idea for Qwacks come to life, and what convinced you there was a need for this platform?
In the early 2020s, I spent a lot of time working with various gaming companies, including Steer Studios and gaming acceleration programs like Game Changers and Game Founders. One common problem I noticed across all of these is that strong, creative talent was being held back by gaps in technology, production, and go-to-market tools. It was making game development slow and over-budget, but worst of all, it was preventing fun, creative game ideas from being realized, as developers felt they had to follow trends instead of their creativity.
And that’s weird. Gaming is an imaginative industry, and it’s been around so long that the tools to underpin this creativity should be widely accessible. I had assumed they would be, but when I looked into it more, I realized that many studios are still using significant resources to build their own tech or looking outside the industry for tooling. In my view, that’s rarely the best use of capital and results in gaming revenues flowing into other industries. That’s why I set out to create Qwacks: to bring together these much-needed tools and create an easy-to-follow development pipeline that lives within the gaming industry itself.
Feature creep, expanding budgets, and increasingly long development cycles have become common across the industry. Why do you think these issues have become so widespread, and what practical steps can studios take to avoid falling into those traps?
A lot of game developers are ambitious. They have an idea in their head and want to see it come to fruition exactly as envisioned. When the gaming sector was still young, hardware and cartridge limitations held many games back, but it also helped keep games in scope. Now that technology has made game development easier and allowed for more visually impressive games, with larger memory sizes also enabling much bigger games, these limitations have eased. While that’s great for allowing creatives to see their vision through, it has also resulted in feature creep, which snowballs into longer development cycles and, further, unsustainable budgets.
Industry veterans may have the experience required to prevent this from happening, but first-time developers lack resources that tell them how long a game should take or how much budget they realistically need, and I think that’s why we see a lot of small developers fail or fall off before their game is even finished. To avoid this, it requires research up-front – look at similar games to the ones you are making and find out what their budget, sales, development time, etc. were. Follow the steps that worked for others and stick to them.
Many developers worry that relying too heavily on data can result in safer, more formulaic games. How do you encourage studios to use analytics as a decision-making tool without compromising creativity and innovation?
Data shouldn’t tell developers what kind of game to make; instead, it should help guide them in how to make it. Yes, data can help developers find a niche, but often that ‘niche’ is way bigger than it should be.
If you’re a developer making a 2D, pixel-art platformer, you should use data to understand the average budget size and development time for a game of this type and scale and stick to that. Failing to do this and over-scoping projects has led to studios becoming unsustainable in the long-run. But with data, developers can learn timelines and budgets that help studios survive.
To what extent can data actually predict what players will enjoy? Can it help developers discover new opportunities, or is it mainly useful for understanding what has already proven successful?
Getting games into real players’ hands as early as possible is vital. Rather than trying to predict what players want, game devs should make a beautiful game and use data to help them find their players, who will then guide further features and development. Where data really shines is in helping steer developers towards making their original ideas a success.
From your experience working with developers, what is the biggest mistake first-time studios make before they even begin production, and how can they set themselves up for a better chance of success?
The biggest mistake I’ve seen is trying to make a game that appeals to as many people as possible. We’ve seen this mistake even with big companies over the last decade, where a lot of live-service, squad-based team shooter games came out and failed. These games were all trying to compete with established names in this genre, all because they saw the success those titans achieved and wanted a piece of it. If the big established companies are even failing to compete, then a first-time studio doesn’t even have a chance.
I’m not saying a developer shouldn’t go for a game in a busy genre, though, if that’s what they want to make. Instead, they should really consider who their target audience is and realistically scope the game around an expected player base. I always say that games must aim to capture 50% of a smaller niche than 1% of a hyper-competitive one. That smaller niche is more likely to remain lifelong fans and has more room for growth than the 1% does.
Saudi Arabia has made significant investments in gaming over the past few years, from studios and publishers to infrastructure and talent development. How do you assess the ecosystem today, and what opportunities or challenges do you think still lie ahead?
The talent, investment and passionate gamers are all here, but it’s still relatively early. Many local studios are run by passionate but inexperienced developers who lack the muscle memory of making hit games and an established gametech pipeline to support them. But it’s an industry that will continue to grow rapidly, and Qwacks will play a part in that growth.
Looking ahead to the next couple of years, what does success look like for Qwacks? Do you see the company becoming an essential part of every game studio’s development pipeline, or is there an even broader vision you’re working toward?
We want developers from across the globe to be using Qwacks to help make exciting and original games with lower financial risk. With established pipelines and access to all the data and tools they need, games can be scoped better, built faster and launched sooner. Qwacks will ultimately be a success when it can help studios around the world close the execution gap, meaning crazy, creative ideas can get to market sustainably.
CEO and co-founder of Qwacks
