Lagos Life is Now Valued at $10m, Less Than 8 days after Launch

Days earlier, its founder dismissed a reported $100,000 offer, saying it was worth $1 billion

Lagos Life, the free Sims-style viral browser-based game set in a virtual Lagos, is now reportedly valued at $10 million, just eight days after it went live.

The valuation comes from a $500,000 pre-seed round raised by Vatar, Inc., a company game creator, Shalom Rayhamen incorporated in Delaware on October 5, four days after the game launched, according to state records seen by Techpoint Africa. Rayhamen says the round took a day to close and was completed three days after incorporation.

Flutterwave CEO Olugbenga “GB” Agboola invested through his fund, Resilience17, alongside Oo Nwoye, Terra Industries CEO Nathan Nwachuku, and Mono CEO Abdulhamid Hassan. Rayhamen, a UK-based Nigerian software developer, released the game on October 1.

Rayhamen told The African Engineer on October 6 that she was paying roughly $2,000 a month for Amazon Web Services (AWS), which hosts the game, and $4,000 a month for Cloudflare, which protects it from bots and attacks. She put her running costs so far at about $6,500, and said someone had given her $10,000 in AWS credits.

Getting there took two infrastructure moves in the game’s first week. Rayhamen started on Cloudflare’s database service, which she called “not scalable” under the load, moved the database to DigitalOcean, then moved the whole application to AWS and switched on autoscaling.

Those figures came when the game had about 2.5 million players. By October 8, it had 4.3 million, she told TechCabal, which reported that she declined to say how much the game costs to run.

What Lagos Life earns

Lagos Life has charged brands since launch. Businesses rent billboards and lagoon plots inside the game, and Techpoint Africa observed billboard prices rising from ₦5,000 ($3.77) to ₦50,000 ($37.66) a week on October 5.

Rayhamen posted that the game made about $46,900 in its first four days. Vatar now says it has earned and contracted more than $170,000, a figure that combines money received with deals signed. Its five revenue streams include advertising, music promotion, brand deals, football streaming, and players paying real money to top up their in-game cash.

On Rayhamen’s own numbers, the first four days of revenue would cover the AWS and Cloudflare bills she described for about seven months. Those bills were quoted before the player count almost doubled, and she hasn’t said whether Vatar is profitable.

An economy with too much money

Top-ups bring real money into an in-game economy Rayhamen admits is out of balance. “We have too much money in the game. So much money,” she told The African Engineer.

A loophole let some players generate more cash than the game intended, and that money spread through transfers between players. Her fix flagged accounts that had only received transfers, and some players saw their balances drop to zero. In an interview with tech YouTuber Fisayo Fosudo, she said some players held “trillions” and that her team was working to rebalance the economy.

The game has also added expensive items for wealthier players. “We have created a class,” she told Fosudo. “We need to offer that class their value.”

Players have asked to withdraw money from the game. Lagos Life’s terms describe its in-game naira as non-redeemable, and Rayhamen told The African Engineer that demand alone wouldn’t settle whether to allow withdrawals.

From $1 billion to $10 million

In the Fosudo interview, published on October 7, Rayhamen dismissed a reported $100,000 offer for the game. “$100,000 is small. Lagos Life is valued at $1 billion,” she said.

Asked what success would look like in 30 to 90 days, she named two goals: closing a pre-seed round and releasing a second game. Vatar closed its round within days, at a $10 million valuation, 1% of the figure she had named. The $500,000 buys investors roughly 5% of the company.

She also told Fosudo that Lagos Life apps for Android and iOS could arrive by the end of October. The funding will go to product, marketing, and hiring, according to the company.