Iran reports 29m gamers, flags funding gap in digital games sector
Iran has 29 million active video-game players, roughly one-third of the population, a senior official at the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Finance said on Friday, urging state bodies and investors to step up financial backing for domestic game developers.
Mohsen Qaemi-Nasab, director-general of the Presidential Office at the ministry’s Financial Intelligence Center, gave the figure in an interview with IRNA on the sidelines of the “Game Week; Haft-Khan” (a reference to the Seven Labors in Persian epic literature) event at Tehran’s Milad Tower, which opened on February 12 and run until the February 18.
He said the scale of participation made gaming a serious cultural and economic sector that policymakers could not afford to ignore. After touring exhibition stands and meeting developers and publishers, Qaemi-Nasab said many studios were seeking structured investment and institutional support to commercialize products and retain creative young talent.
Iranian developers, he added, have made tangible technical progress, but require targeted capital and clearer funding channels to scale up production and compete regionally. Vahid Yazdanian, deputy minister for communications and head of National Information Network development, said gaming forms a core component of the network’s content layer under its four-tier architecture of infrastructure, network services, applications and content.
Yazdanian said estimates put the number of Iranian gamers between 20 million and 40 million, a user base that in scale and engagement time exceeds many domestic and foreign messaging platforms operating in the country. He linked user satisfaction in online gaming directly to network performance indicators such as latency, bandwidth and stability. Lower ping rates and faster data transmission, he said, translate into higher user satisfaction and serve as measurable benchmarks for the National Information Network’s effectiveness. Organized by the National Foundation for Computer Games in cooperation with the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting and Milad Tower, the week-long event consolidates several specialized festivals and industry programs under one platform to showcase capabilities and attract investment into Iran’s digital games market.