Türkiye’s fast-evolving games hub, creativity vs business, and Fire Emblem's mobile promo | Week in Views
The games industry moves quickly and while stories may come and go there are some that we just can't let go of…
So, to give those particularly thorny topics a further going over we've created a weekly digest where the members of the PocketGamer.biz team share their thoughts and go that little bit deeper on some of the more interesting things that have happened in mobile gaming in the past week.
Craig Chapple
The Top 30 Türkiye Game Makers of 2026
This week we published our list of the Top 30 Türkiye Game Makers of 2026.
As we noted in our report, the list, published in association with Xsolla, is designed to reflect some of the hottest studios right now.
But as we put together this list, one of the most eye-opening things I noticed, and it’s precisely why everyone is talking about the country’s games hub, is just how fast a pace this industry operates at.
Each week and month that goes by, another startup emerges in Türkiye with millions in investment or a new hit (or both!). Nailing down a Top 30 was a challenge - frankly the list could be larger. And yet even with a Top 50, weeks and months later, things could change yet again as another studio emerges.
For our full region report on Türkiye, which we’ll publish next week, we spoke to Arcadia Gaming Partners MD Akin Babayigit about the sector and why it’s producing so many studios. A couple of quotes stood out, and one in particular sums up the above.
"There is special know-how around casual games, very deep expertise in user acquisition, and performance marketing,” he said.
"This is combined with an insane work ethic that I have not seen in any other country around the world. Putting all these together, in a very competitive red-ocean category such as mobile games, we see the Turkish developers winning.
“Every time someone declares that it's too late or too crowded in mobile games, a new Turkish developer emerges."
Türkiye is a market you just can’t take your eyes off. Blink, and you’ll miss the next hit.
Mariam Ahmad
Neogames Finland’s Suvi Latva on the changing realities for Finnish studios
This week I talked to Neogames Finland’s chief business advisor Suvi Latva about two decades of watching Finnish studios get founded. The thing that stands out is how much easier it is to make a game and how little that’s changed about building a company.
Latva has watched the gatekeepers fall away one by one - first publishers, then Nokia as the mobile buyer, then app stores, then Unity. AI is just the latest barrier to drop. But every time a barrier falls, the commercial responsibility that gatekeeper used to carry - understanding your audience, discoverability, monetisation - lands back on the studio.
The pattern she keeps seeing is founders building the game they want to play without testing whether anyone else wants to, then drifting into genre and platform choices "by default rather than deliberately” until the commercial consequences are too expensive to go back on.
Latva believes that Finland's edge was a combination of timing plus an ecosystem that treats other studios as community rather than competition. This can be credited to a small domestic market that never lets anyone get complacent.
Her one ask for first-time founders, ahead of her talk at Pocket Gamer Connects Nordics on October 20th and 21st: recognise that genre and platform aren't creative choices, they're business decisions - about audience, financing and risk, whether you notice yourself making them or not.
Aaron Astle
Nintendo taps mobile apps to promote Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave
It’s always a good week when I get to talk about Fire Emblem, and this is one such occasion. Recently, Nintendo presented a Fire Emblem Direct to reveal new insights on upcoming Switch 2 title Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave, including an overview of game mechanics for series newcomers and some tweaks even veterans will need to get to grips with.
There were also story beats and an increasing number of reasons I still need to purchase a Switch 2. And, with an unexpected mobile twist, the presentation wrapped up with Nintendo leveraging some of its apps as promotional tools.
Nintendo Music, for example, has debuted 10 tracks from the game’s OST, offering Nintendo Switch Online subscribers early access to 30 minutes of songs. Meanwhile, Nintendo Today has a new Fire Emblem theme with its calendar stylised like Fire Emblem: Three Houses’ and plenty of character profiles for the upcoming title.
It seems like new content is dropping daily in the app, encouraging fans to get on their phones to read about the latest info and check out gameplay trailers. At the same time, it’s good promotion for Nintendo Today regulars who may not have tried out a Fire Emblem game before - suddenly bombarded with the brand in the weeks leading up to the new release.
This’ll be the first main series release in almost four years and the first on Switch 2, so I can see the thinking behind Nintendo leveraging its apps catalogue to the fullest.
Companies
People
