Lagos Life, the free browser game where you rent a flat, find a job and try to get by in a virtual Lagos, has gone from a weekend project to a funded company in nine days. Its maker, Vatar, announced a $500,000 angel round on Friday, Oct. 9, the same day the game’s live dashboard passed 5 million players.
The short version
Lagos Life launched on Oct. 1 and says it has more than 5 million players. The company behind it has now raised $500,000 from three Nigerian tech founders.
- Lagos Life is a free, Sims-style game you play in your browser. There is nothing to download.
- The game’s own stats page showed 5,067,376 players on Oct. 9. The figures have not been independently audited.
- Vatar’s backers are Mono’s Abdulhamid Hassan, Terra Industries’ Nathan Nwachuku and Flutterwave’s Olugbenga Agboola. Reports put the valuation at $10 million.
- Players do not pay to play. Brands pay up to ₦500,000 a week for billboards and other ad spots inside the game.
- The money in the game cannot be withdrawn, and a $LAGOSLIFE crypto token going around is not from the developer.
In plain terms: a game built around everyday Nigerian life, played in a browser on an ordinary phone, has pulled in the kind of numbers that usually take big studios months. Every player figure in this story comes from the company itself.
What is Lagos Life?
It plays like The Sims, set in Lagos. You create a character, pick a starting background (the game offers profiles such as “Nepo” and “Lapo”), take a job, buy food, watch your energy and pay rent in virtual naira. Thousands of people share the same map, so you bump into other players on the street, at parties and by the lagoon. Abuja and Port Harcourt have since been added.
Because it runs in the browser, you open a link and start playing. That matters when app store downloads, phone storage and card payments keep many people out of mobile gaming.
The game’s creator, Shalom Rayhamen, has said the idea came from Lagos Run, a danfo-driving browser game released on Sept. 26 by Berlin-based engineer Opeyemi Adeniran. Lagos Run is the “traffic game” many people saw first. It passed 20,000 players within days and kicked off the wave of Nigerian browser games that followed. Rayhamen explained the link in her launch post:
How big is it, really?
Here is how the numbers have moved since the game went live on Oct. 1, all from the company:
- Oct. 5: more than 1.2 million players, on a dashboard the developer showed Techpoint Africa.
- Oct. 8: about 4.3 million players across 15 countries, Rayhamen told TechCabal.
- Oct. 9: 5,067,376 players, 110,634 online at the same time and more than 34 million visits, on the live stats page Rayhamen shared on X.
Vatar’s own website, updated on the same day, says 4.5 million players and 1.5 million on an average day, so the totals depend on when you look. One more thing to keep in mind: these are accounts, not people, and nothing stops one person from opening more than one.
Who pays for a free game?
Mostly brands. The game’s advertising page, checked on Oct. 9, lists a week on its 20 digital billboards at ₦250,000, with each ad taking turns on screen for 15 seconds. Billboards at the in-game airports in Lagos, Abuja and Port Harcourt cost ₦500,000 a week, an ad beside the live player numbers costs ₦150,000, and a plot on the lagoon costs ₦18,000. Brands pay through Flutterwave, whose CEO is one of Vatar’s investors, and their ads go live once payment clears. The page bans ads for scams, crypto coins or tokens, and account sales.
Prices have climbed fast. Billboards started at ₦5,000 a week, and Techpoint Africa saw them listed at ₦50,000 on Oct. 5. Musicians have also paid ₦50,000 to have their songs played in the game’s clubs, according to earlier reports. Vatar also sells branded danfos, storefronts and company headquarters inside the game, and lists in-game top-ups among its income.
Vatar says it has earned and signed more than $170,000 in deals since launch, a figure that mixes cash received with contracts. Rayhamen had earlier said the game made about $46,900 in its first four days, and that hosting costs about $6,000 a month. The company has not said whether it is profitable.
Who is behind it, and who invested?
Vatar Inc. was set up days after the game launched and calls itself a social worlds company. It has three co-founders: Shalom Rayhamen, CEO and CTO, a software engineer who previously built anti-money laundering tools at Napier AI; Owen Rayhamen, chief product officer, a former product manager at Citi; and Anderson Oriahi, chief business development officer, who co-founded the health tech company Heala.
The company’s announcement names three angel investors: Abdulhamid “AB” Hassan, co-founder and CEO of Mono; Nathan Nwachuku, co-founder and CEO of Terra Industries; and Olugbenga “GB” Agboola, co-founder and CEO of Flutterwave. The $500,000 is about ₦666 million at the official exchange rate of ₦1,332.90 to the dollar on Oct. 7. Techpoint Africa reported that the round values Vatar at $10 million, which would mean investors own about 5%.
Vatar says the money will go into the platform and into bringing new cities online. Rayhamen has said Android and iOS apps could follow by the end of October, but no date has been confirmed.
Before you play
- Use the real address. The game lives at lagoslife.app. Search results are already full of look-alike sites calling themselves “official.” None of them come from the developer.
- The money in the game is not real. Under the game’s terms, virtual naira cannot be cashed out. Vatar plans rewards such as airtime and food that players can earn in the game, but it lists them as coming next. Anyone offering to buy or sell Lagos Life cash for real naira is not the company.
- Protect your account. Since Oct. 7, a forgotten password is reset with your username and a few security questions, not an email code. Pick answers other people can’t guess or find on your social media, and don’t share your username in public posts.
- Skip the $LAGOSLIFE crypto token. It was not created by the developer.
- Balances can change. A loophole let some players create extra cash, and fixing it wiped some balances to zero.
What to watch
The real test is whether people keep playing once the novelty fades. Watch for the mobile apps, how Vatar handles players asking to withdraw their in-game cash, and whether the player-run elections and police it has promised arrive. For brands, a week on an in-game billboard has gone from ₦5,000 to ₦250,000 since launch.
