Blacknut is going carrier-first in the Middle East and North Africa.
The gaming service is teaming up with Media Ranch to push cloud gaming deeper into the Middle East and North Africa, with Palestinian carrier Jawwal set to become the first operator to bring the service to subscribers, according to a press release.
The partnership pairs Blacknut, which bills itself as the world’s leading pure-player cloud gaming service, with Media Ranch, a regional mobile payment, monetization and digital services provider. The companies announced the deal as part of Blacknut’s broader push to get premium cloud gaming in front of more consumers across MENA through established telecom relationships.
Jawwal, Palestine’s largest mobile operator, will be the first to roll out the service commercially under the new agreement. Its subscribers will get carrier-integrated access to Blacknut’s library of more than 1,000 games without needing dedicated gaming hardware.
The move comes as telecom operators across the region look for ways to deepen customer engagement and open up new recurring revenue. Cloud gaming has increasingly become part of that strategy, giving carriers a way to bundle premium entertainment into existing subscriber relationships rather than competing on network pricing alone.
Media Ranch’s role centers on the infrastructure side of that equation. The company already works with telecom operators in 14 countries across MENA, handling carrier billing, mobile payments and digital content distribution. That footprint, along with its existing operator relationships, is what made it an appealing partner for Blacknut’s expansion plans in the region.
“Our mission is to make premium gaming accessible to everyone, wherever they choose to play,” said Olivier Avaro, Chief Executive Officer of Blacknut. “Media Ranch brings deep regional expertise and trusted operator relationships that make them an ideal partner as we expand across MENA.”
A representative for Media Ranch framed the partnership similarly in a statement from the press release, pointing to cloud gaming’s growing importance as an entertainment category and the value of making it simple for operators to offer to subscribers.
Blacknut’s pitch centers on convenience. The subscription service streams more than 1,000 games to Smart TVs, PCs, Macs, tablets and smartphones without requiring downloads or installations. It supports up to five player profiles and four simultaneous controllers, positioning it as a household subscription rather than a single-user product.
The Jawwal deployment adds to a list of telecom partnerships Blacknut has built in the Middle East and North Africa, where the company has leaned on subscription and carrier billing models to distribute its catalog. Carrier billing in particular has been a common route for gaming and streaming services trying to grow in markets where credit card penetration is lower and mobile payment habits are more established.
For Blacknut, the Media Ranch partnership is less about a single launch and more about scale. Rather than negotiating operator by operator across MENA, the company gets a single partner with existing billing and distribution relationships across more than a dozen markets — a structure that could speed up future rollouts beyond Jawwal.
Neither company disclosed financial terms of the partnership or a timeline for expanding the service to additional operators in the region beyond the initial Jawwal launch.