Mobile Gaming in Türkiye: Exclusive Insights from Market Experts

Türkiye has emerged in recent years – and is continuing to grow – as a nation capitalizing on mobile gaming’s impressive trajectory. Its resilient gaming market has become a globally renowned hub for both new and established game studios, attracting significant capital investment. 

Zeynep Dierks, a Statista researcher specializing in the Turkish market, and adjoe’s Senior Demand Growth Manager Berkay Doğan Uslu teamed up to discuss the state of mobile gaming in Türkiye in an exclusive webinar dedicated to uncovering the latest regional trends. 

We’ve summarized these trends and insights into an overview of Türkiye’s market growth, player demographics, and gaming behaviors. 

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Where Is Türkiye’s Gaming Sector At?

Zeynep tells us: “Pandemic times were good times for the Turkish mobile gaming industry.” 

During the COVID pandemic, the country established 148 studios in 2020 and 2021. Many of these studios specialize in the hypercasual game genre. 

Berkay explains: “Hypercasual led the way by giving users easy gameplay, easy progression, and making users also feel rewarded for their actions. It paid out in a big way, both in terms of installs and, of course, in terms of increasing the market size.”

The genre’s growth, Berkay claims, is the main factor behind Türkiye’s growing reputation as a gaming country and an environment in which gaming startups can grow. 

The pair point out that this trend is shifting; Berkay identifies: “Now we are seeing more and more big companies but less and less newly founded startups.”

Despite this visible slowdown in the formation of new startups, the Turkish mobile gaming market continues to grow and mature – and even compete with other gaming markets.

How’s Revenue in the Turkish Mobile Gaming Market?

Zeynep points out: “Türkiye is still a relatively new and developing market in the mobile game industry. It’s not fair to compare the Turkish gaming market to the well-established ones like the US, Japan, or China.” 

Zooming out to look at the rest of the world, revenue from the mobile gaming market worldwide increased steadily year on year after a marked drop in 2022. 

And if we zoom back in to look at Türkiye’s mobile gaming market specifically, it is expected to grow by around 40 percent from 2024 to reach a new peak of 500 million US dollars by 2029. 

Although Turkey is not yet among the top-three European giants for mobile game revenue, it saw the fastest revenue growth of around 46 percent during the pandemic. It was also least affected by the post-pandemic slowdown, when revenue climbed by a further 15 percent in 2021.

With this resilience to global volatility and fluctuation in the industry, Berkay states: “The future is quite bright for Türkiye.”

And then we come to investment and the nation’s publishers. Türkiye’s mobile gaming industry had much to celebrate during the pandemic years – and especially, its prolific gaming publishers, which managed to secure significant streams of capital investment. 

Zeynep mentions that Dream Games stood out as the Turkish game publisher enjoying the largest share of investment during this period. It received 467 million US dollars, compared with Spyke Games, which received 55 million US dollars. 

Let’s move on to revenue. Peak Games, acquired by Zynga in 2020, achieved impressive revenue and download statistics – particularly, with its hit titles Match Factory and Toy Blast, which generated 7.8 million and 8.7 million US dollars, respectively. Türkiye is also home to Rollic Games, the leading publisher from Türkiye for downloads, which has recorded 300 million downloads worldwide.

Berkay summarizes: “You have Dream Games there with its pioneer Royal Match; you have Peak Games with its big three titles. As a different business model, we also have Rollic Games. You don’t see this company in investment charts or in charts for highest in-app revenue because it was mainly focused on hypercasual and was mainly monetized by ads. In the last years, Rollic has published games in collaboration with UFC and Barbie. For me as a Turkish person, it’s great to see Rollic doing such good things.”

What about Turkish Mobile Gamers?

But it’s not just homegrown publishers making a name for themselves in mobile gaming. Türkiye has emerged as a hotspot for many top global gaming companies – among the top-grossing ones are Zynga, Tencent, and Supercell.

Mobile gaming has emerged as the dominant gaming platform across Türkiye, following a surge in the total number of mobile gamers nationwide. As of 2023, the number of people who prefer to play console and PC games in Türkiye dropped. The number of Turkish mobile gamers meanwhile climbed to peak at 44 million gamers in 2023. 

Berkay explains: “Playing mobile games is a lot easier than playing on your console or PC. And it’s also cheaper because we all have phones – and our phones are getting better and better.”

He continues: “All the big publishers have to buy users from Türkiye because it’s a big market. We can see all of the big players are active in the Turkish market. We, as adjoe, encourage publishers to acquire more and more users from Türkiye as well because we see the potential there. It’s going to only grow from there.“

What kinds of mobile games are these gamers playing? Following the popularity of the hypercasual genre during the pandemic, insights into a survey’s findings reveal the nation’s affinity with puzzle, trivia, and word games, followed closely by card games.

What Can We Take from This Data?

Türkiye’s mobile gaming market has rapidly positioned itself as a global force that has been particularly resilient during and following the pandemic.

For publishers, developers, and investors looking to capitalize on this momentum, the insights shared by adjoe and Statista offer valuable perspectives on playing behavior and investment opportunities.

As Berkay shares: “This is what I’m excited about: Both the publishers from Türkiye and Türkiye as a user base. As the data is showing, the Turkish gaming industry has a really bright future.” 

By understanding the nuances of Turkish gamer behavior, genre preferences, and market trends, stakeholders can tap into Türkiye’s robust gaming ecosystem and maximize the opportunities it offers on the global stage.

For more insights, view the full webinar on mobile gaming in Türkiye and access the latest data from Statista on video gaming in Türkiye.