Guides
Search for a game studio in the UAE and the first page is written almost entirely by companies selling game development, not by anyone who has ever hired one. We sell game development too, and we appear on this list — so read it with that in mind. What follows is the guide we wanted when we started: who is actually here, what kind of company each one is, and which briefs each is genuinely suited to.
The UAE differs from the rest of the Gulf in one way that changes your decision. A large share of the studios carrying a Dubai or Abu Dhabi address arrived recently, drawn by the media free zones and a deliberate national push into games. That is not a criticism — some of the strongest teams in the region are now here because of it. But "based in the UAE" can mean a studio founded here by Emiratis, or a global company that opened an office last year, and those two answer very different briefs. Every entry below says which it is.
Third-party details gathered: 2026-08-19
How this list was put together
The companies
Based in: Abu Dhabi
An independent Abu Dhabi studio founded and self-funded by Fakhra Al Mansouri, among the most publicly visible Emirati game developers. Its titles include Hop Hop Away, which grew out of a student prototype, and Who Lurks, a mobile social-deception game recognised at the IndieCade festival in Los Angeles. If what you want is a studio that is Emirati in origin rather than in address, this is the clearest example on the page.
Based in: Dubai
A Dubai indie developer and publisher founded in 2019. Its own site leads with Enci's Solution, an original title set in the world of Ji'we and Enci and listed on Steam. A team that builds and publishes its own games is a different proposition from a services studio: the upside is people who have carried a title all the way to a storefront, and the thing worth checking is how much of their week a client project would actually get.
Based in: Abu Dhabi — part of Ubisoft, France
The Abu Dhabi studio of the French publisher Ubisoft, and the longest-established international game operation in the country; its CSI: Hidden Crimes was the first mobile game developed in Abu Dhabi. It is not a studio you can hire, and it is here for a different reason: it is a large part of why senior game talent is in the UAE at all, and anyone searching for game companies in the country will meet the name early. Knowing what it is saves you a wasted enquiry.
Based in: Remote-first, serving the UAE and the GCC
That is us, so treat this as the least objective entry here. We are a remote-first studio serving clients across the Gulf, working in Unity, Unreal Engine 5 and the browser, and our own titles are Arabic-first — KoutQ8, Nabsh, and Arrab in development. Our client work includes an interactive floor game built for a retail activation in Kuwait. What we would actually claim as a difference is that Arabic and right-to-left are how our games are built rather than a layer added at the end. If you need a team physically inside a UAE free zone, or a studio with console production already on its record, others on this page fit better.
Our game development servicesBased in: India, with a UAE services presence
A large international outsourcing studio founded in 2011 and ISO 9001:2015 certified, with a UAE services page and offices across several markets. It covers an unusually wide range — console, PC, mobile, VR, art and LiveOps — and is the most visible search result for game development across this whole region. If you need breadth and bench depth from a single vendor, that breadth is real. If you want a team that shares your working week and grew up on the games your players did, it is a different proposition.
01
Abu Dhabi and Dubai have spent years making it cheap and administratively simple for a game company to set up, through media free zones and a coordinated push behind the sector. It worked: studios relocated, publishers opened regional offices, and the local talent pool deepened considerably. For a buyer, the useful consequence is that you can now find senior console and live-service experience in your own time zone, which was not true in the Gulf a decade ago.
The consequence worth watching is that a free-zone licence says nothing about how long a company has been doing the work, or where the people on your project actually sit. A licence is a legal address, not a studio. Ask how long the office has existed, how many of the team are in it, and which time zone your daily contact wakes up in — those three answers tell you more than the address does.
02
A relocated studio brings a portfolio built somewhere else. That portfolio is usually real and usually good — but it was made by a team in another country, under another production culture, and the office in front of you may share very few of those people. This is the single most common gap between what a UAE pitch deck shows and what the project gets.
The fix is not to avoid relocated studios — several of the best options in the country are exactly that. It is to ask which named credits on the deck were earned by people who will be on your project, and what share of their week you are buying. A studio that answers that plainly is telling you it has nothing to hide; a studio that reaches for the company portfolio instead has answered a different question.
Common questions
Tell us what you're building and we'll give you an honest read on scope — including if we think someone else should build it.
