Inside NIP Group's growth for the future in Abu Dhabi
NIP Group, the global entertainment company behind the Ninjas in Pyjamas esports brand, established its global headquarters in Abu Dhabi in 2025 through a five-year partnership with the Abu Dhabi Investment Office. The move has been accompanied by jobs, an esports academy, an internship program for UAE nationals, and educational initiatives as the emirate builds out its gaming and digital entertainment ecosystem.
Now, NIP Group CEO Hicham Chahine is turning his attention to the next part of that ecosystem: developing the talent needed to sustain it. For Chahine, building the next generation of gaming talent starts with a simple change in perspective: students need to see that there is a career in gaming even if they never become professional players.
That lesson emerged from NIP Group's recent esports and gaming education pilot in Abu Dhabi. Chahine says the students who became most interested in pursuing careers in the industry were often not the strongest players in the room. Instead, they were the ones naturally taking on responsibilities around the game, whether that meant organizing the group or running the chat.
“Once we framed those behaviors as job functions rather than distractions, they recognized themselves in the industry straight away,” Chahine says. The pilot also showed him that the career pathway needs to be visible in the first place, as many students arrived assuming “the only career in gaming was going pro.”
That distinction is now informing NIP Group's work with the Abu Dhabi Department of Education and Knowledge (ADEK), which has signed an agreement with the company to develop a dedicated esports and gaming curriculum.
The curriculum is still being designed, and Chahine is careful not to get ahead of that process. He says the intention is to create practical, industry-linked learning rather than a theoretical course about gaming, with students expected to be able to “run something instead of only describing it.” With the program expected to launch later this year, the broader objective is to give students a pathway they can follow into employment.
Making the careers behind gaming visible
The need for that kind of education becomes clearer when looking beyond the most visible parts of the games industry. Chahine identifies event production and community management as two areas where education systems are currently less prepared to provide relevant pathways.
Game development already has academic routes, while content creation has become highly visible through online platforms. The people organizing tournaments and keeping communities running, however, are often difficult for students and parents to see.
“Those roles are where a lot of the jobs sit,” Chahine says, adding that people frequently learn them by doing them. That is why, in his view, having an industry partner involved in education matters.
It also changes the way gaming can be discussed with parents. Rather than trying to convince families that gaming itself should be taken seriously, Chahine says he takes a different approach: “I don't argue with perception. I walk parents through the business instead.”
Once parents see how much of the industry revolves around production and operations, the conversation can move away from competitive play. NIP Group's own workforce illustrates the point, Chahine says, with most employees having never competed professionally. Behind every game, competition or piece of content is a substantial amount of work required to bring it to an audience.
Adaptability at the centre of gaming careers
Preparing students for gaming careers also presents a particular challenge because the industry changes quickly. Technologies evolve, platforms come and go, and new forms of content and digital experiences can create roles that did not previously exist.
For Chahine, that makes adaptability one of the most important skills students can develop. “The tools change constantly and knowing how to learn quickly outlasts mastery of any single platform,” he says.
He also highlights the ability to work across time zones and cultures, along with understanding how online communities behave when there is no moderator immediately present. Traditional education can reward depth within a fixed subject, while gaming employers increasingly need people capable of repeatedly adapting their skill sets.
That is one reason Chahine sees gaming and esports as potentially belonging within vocational education rather than remaining exclusively extracurricular. He describes extracurricular activity as “a reasonable entry point,” but argues that it can limit what students ultimately gain from the experience.
For someone seeking a professional career in gaming, he says, there should be proper credentials and employment outcomes attached to the pathway, giving students a legitimate route into the sector comparable to established creative and technical fields.
The lessons games can teach outside the industry
Chahine's argument for gaming education also extends beyond employment in gaming itself. One of the skills he values most is the ability to deal with failure in a public setting. Competitive games can put players in situations where mistakes are visible, followed by an opportunity to understand what went wrong and try again.
“The most valuable one is learning to fail in public,” Chahine says, describing a cycle in which players lose in front of an audience, work out why, and return to play the following week again. He also points to coordinating several people toward a common objective in real time, often with incomplete information and little opportunity to deliberate, as a genuine exercise in leadership.
There is another increasingly relevant skill embedded in gaming communities: working with people you have never met face to face. Players can collaborate across languages, cultures, and time zones long before they encounter those circumstances in a traditional workplace. Chahine argues that this generation has already developed some of those habits before entering its first job.
Why Abu Dhabi?
For NIP Group, Abu Dhabi provides a strong environment in which to develop this approach because gaming and esports are being connected with broader ecosystem-building efforts. Chahine points to the company's five-year partnership with the Abu Dhabi Investment Office, which brought NIP Group's global headquarters to the emirate alongside jobs, an esports academy, an internship program for UAE Nationals and educational initiatives.
“Abu Dhabi committed early and approached it structurally,” Chahine says. He also points to the emirate's young, digitally native population and government support for developing the knowledge economy as important elements in creating the conditions for gaming talent development.
NIP Group sees itself as the industry component of that wider effort. Governments and schools can establish the educational framework, Chahine explains, while the company can provide insight into the jobs themselves and the entry points available to prospective workers.
Developing talent in the region is also a long-term priority for Chahine. He argues that ecosystem growth needs a strong talent pipeline alongside it, making education and workforce development an important part of NIP Group's strategy in the UAE and wider MENA region.
Could Abu Dhabi's model extend across the Middle East?
There is an ambition for the approach to have relevance elsewhere in the Middle East, although NIP Group has not committed to expanding the curriculum beyond Abu Dhabi at this point. Chahine believes the element that could eventually be replicated is the structure rather than the precise course content. The model would involve an education authority working closely with an industry partner that can keep the material aligned with changing workplace requirements.
“Abu Dhabi lines up the demographics, the government's appetite and the knowledge-economy goals all at once,” he says, adding that the company's immediate responsibility remains with the students taking part in the Abu Dhabi program.
Keeping the curriculum current will be particularly important as artificial intelligence, new content formats and virtual experiences reshape gaming and digital entertainment. Chahine's answer is to focus on foundational skills rather than attempting to predict every future job title.
“You don't teach the jobs, you teach the foundations underneath them,” he says, pointing to communication and problem-solving as abilities that can remain useful regardless of which tools exist a decade from now. He also believes the curriculum itself needs to be designed for regular revision because “fixed content goes stale fast in this industry.”
Measuring success through careers
The ultimate test for the ADEK partnership, according to Chahine, will come after students leave the classroom. “Success is students in real jobs rather than enrollment numbers,” he says. In five years, he wants graduates working throughout Abu Dhabi's gaming ecosystem, including at NIP Group and other companies.
Over a 10-year horizon, he hopes some will establish their own studios and create games from the region. The wider ambition is for the MENA gaming ecosystem to develop its own talent and intellectual property, with Chahine saying that “if the region starts exporting talent and IP instead of importing it, we've done the job.”
That long-term view also explains why Chahine sees gaming education as part of a broader conversation about the future of work. A generation has already learned to communicate, coordinate and compete inside digital environments before entering traditional workplaces, and he expects digital entertainment to continue influencing how younger people learn and work.
For educators, policymakers and parents still considering where gaming belongs in that future, Chahine's argument comes back to the scale and diversity of the industry. “Most of the roles inside it have nothing to do with playing,” he says, making the case for treating those careers as a legitimate part of education and workforce planning.
His request to the institutions shaping that pathway is direct: “Take the careers seriously and let us help build them.”
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