Six up and coming Turkish games companies you should know about
Felix Braberg is a founder and host of two & a half gamers. This article was originally shared on the Felix Braberg substack.
I always joked that a term that was used in the early days of mobile gaming was: “If you want to win, hire a Finn.” Now I say, “If you want to make it work, Hire a Turk.”
The Turkish gaming market has seen some crazy exits throughout the years. I’d argue that the Turkish gaming scene is now in its third generation or cohort of gaming companies.
We had the first generation led by Peak Games, which Zynga acquired for $1.8 billion. The second generation of gaming companies, led by Dream Games, which just announced that it’s raising $2.5 billion in a financing round.
So, the way I see it, we’re now in the third generation of Turkish gaming companies. It’s early days, but I’ve made a list of which third generation Turkish Studios I think are most likely to have very large outcomes.
Grand Games - an Istanbul-based studio that has already made massive waves after Raising $30 million in its Series A round in December 2024.
Its three co-founders, Bekir Celebi, Mustafa Fırtına, and Mehmet Çalım, all worked at Good Job Games together.
Grand Games’ flagship title, “Magic Sort,” which we covered on the podcast, is rumoured to have truly insane numbers. In the last 30 days, Magic Sort has scaled to $2m in IAP and what I estimate to be around $500k in ad revenue.
Another Istanbul-based studio (get used to that in this article), Pine Games, focuses on beautiful ad-monetised games. Their two main titles, Word Weaver and Number Paint have racked up nearly 500k downloads in the last 30 days. It’s early days, but the games show much promise.
Pine Games' c-level is stacked with ex-Peak and ex-Dream Games. It will be interesting to see how this studio progresses. Ad revenue is currently most likely in the $10k to $25k/day region, but I could be wrong!
Where’s Waldo is so last decade - it’s all about “Find the Cat” these days. Launched in May 2024, Find the Cat was one of the break-out success titles from Türkiye last year. It’s now scaled to nearly two million daily active users and monetises only with ads. I estimate that it’s currently generating $72k to $100k/day in ad revenue.
The founders are ex-Good Job Games and Fugo employees. We briefly covered it on the podcast if you want to learn more. It will be interesting to see how far this title can scale!
Also based in Istanbul, Leap, which has the most minimalistic website I’ve ever seen, launched its first title, Hidden Tales, in March 2024. The game recently scaled up to 200k active users daily, mainly in the USA.
The active user base means the ad revenue is most likely between $10k to $20k/day right now, but the game shows a lot of promise. I’m keeping a close eye on this title! Leap Games looks to have some publishing ties with Fugo Games.
Carpe-Yolo, as they say! Yolo Games based (you guessed it!) Istanbul released its first title, Find Differences, in mid-2022. Since then, they’ve been busy scaling and launching two more titles: Find Master and Find Hidden Objects.
Find Differences and Find Hidden Objects have scaled to one million DAU and 500k DAU, respectively. Yes, it’s all driven by beautiful ad revenue. It looks like 2025 will be a very interesting year for YOLO games. Fugo Games, again here, looks to be publishing YOLO’s games.
Finally, a studio based in Izmir - not Istanbul! Mage Games launched Goal Battle - Soccer Games in March 2024. So far, it has been downloaded 1.5 million times and generates about $35k/month in IAP revenue. But it’s scaling!
Also, I want to mention Circle, which was founded by former Good Job Games and Gram Games employees. However, they haven’t released their first title, so I can’t put them on the list yet as there is no data yet.
One certain thing is that Good Job Games seems to be the founder’s foundry in this third generation of Turkish gaming companies.
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