After years of growing WOLF’s social networking app, WOLF Qanawat, garnering valued user and volunteer feedback, as well as our dedicated app team’s insight, we recognised a growth opportunity – introducing interactive visual games into the app to enhance both the offering and the user experience.
We launched the Gaming Hub in-app in summer 2025 and since then it has evolved into a go-to feature, offering a fun, interactive and safe space to compete and be an active part of the community – staying true to the app’s ethos of positive community engagement.
We’ve launched four games in the last year and our users have shown us how much they love playing in-app, with:
- 216,100 unique players
- of which 201,700 are new users
- 12,800,000 total games played.
Successfully building an engaging, exciting and growing community lies in our belief that games should be fun, simple to play and encourage social interaction. All of our games offer this tried and tested formula, which has become the bedrock of our gaming success.
Our first game, Carrom, launched in summer 2025 – it’s a game where players use a striker to flick discs into corner pockets on a board, potting pieces before opponents do. It enabled new users to remain in the WOLF Qanawat community after exiting the game they came in to play, leading to interaction with other users. Games act as easy ice-breakers, giving the chance to form friendships and explore the other in-app features, while building users’ confidence to get involved in what that whole community is doing.
Equally, these new users generate revenue for the business as they will buy Charms and gifts to support other creators. The simplicity of this transition lies in the app’s intelligent chat function that co-exists with the games users play.
Incredibly, in just over a year since Carrom’s launch, the game has had:
- 132,000 unique players
- of which 119,800 are new users
- 3,500,000 games played
Following Carrom’s success, we launched Lonoo – WOLF Qanawat’s take on a classic card game – which is hugely popular with users. Again, users loved the familiarity with the game and ability to chat and play.
As we have launched each game, we’ve made them even better. We have understood how important gaming is to users who want a fun distraction to play with like-minded people, in a safe destination that respects users’ cultures and values. We’ve also noticed how these games are a great fit during sporting events and cultural occasions, such as Ramadan.
We added something a little different when we launched XO to the Gaming Hub – an interactive adaptation of the classic noughts and crosses – with our team experimenting with innovative new presentation styles and 3D graphics.
Lastly, in June, we launched Golden Goal to tie in with the FIFA World Cup 2026 tournament, which was a huge success for our football fan users. Importantly, this was our first game to launch with a store attached, to allow players to make tailored purchases to customise the pitches and footballs.
Such was the success of the Golden Goal in-game store, that we have added stores to all the other games, so users can have fun personalising their player experiences.
We have always tailored the WOLF Qanawat offering to what our users want. The introduction of these interactive games is no different – knowing that games (via in-channel bots) have always been a huge part of the user experience, more recently evolving and delivering a more visually rich experience with Unity-powered games.
We’ve also enjoyed observing and learning from user behaviour across both formats and measuring the effect on community dynamics, new user retention and overall engagement. This important data continues to give us clear signs on what our users like, allowing us to factor this into our future development efforts.
WOLF CEO, Gary Knight, says: “Looking back on the last year of our Gaming Hub and the joy it brings to our users, I am delighted to continue driving future iterations and additions. Excitingly, we are working on more structured tournaments and gaming events, which have been a focal point for our users thus far, so watch this space for more gaming fun before 2026 comes to a close.”
