Dream Games: five people, one game, five billion dollars

In 2019, five people left Peak Games and started their own studio in Istanbul. Soner Aydemir, İkbal Namlı, Hakan Sağlam, Eren Şengül and Serdar Yılmaz. They called it Dream Games.

They spent about two years building one puzzle game.

The launch

Royal Match went out globally in March 2021. It is a match-three puzzle game where you renovate a castle for a king, and again, on the surface it looks like a category that was already full.

Three months later the company raised $155 million at a $1 billion valuation, in a round co-led by Index Ventures and Makers Fund with Balderton, IVP and Kora also in. At that point Royal Match had 6 million monthly active users, was making around $20 million a month from in-app purchases, and sat in the top 20 grossing games in the US, UK and Germany.

They had raised a $50 million Series A only three and a half months before that.

Seven months later, in January 2022, they raised $255 million at $2.75 billion.

So the sequence, from a standing start: game launches March 2021, unicorn by June 2021, $2.75 billion by January 2022.

The two decisions that made it work

One game. Most studios build a portfolio, because a portfolio spreads risk. Dream Games did the opposite and put everything behind a single title, then kept improving it for years rather than moving on to the next thing. Royal Kingdom came much later. This is now something of a house style among Turkish puzzle studios, and Dream Games is the reason.

No ads. Royal Match monetises through in-app purchases only. No rewarded video, no interstitials, no banner taking up the bottom of the screen. That is a revenue stream deliberately left on the table in order to protect how the game feels, which is a confident decision for a company that had not yet proven anything.

Where the money went

This is the part worth paying attention to. Asked what the $155 million was for, the answer was direct: heavy user acquisition, in every channel and every geography, with a particular focus on expanding in Asia.

That is what the money was for. Not offices, not headcount, not a second studio. Buying players.

That is how a modern mobile game gets to the top of the charts. You build something with good retention, then you spend enormous sums showing it to people, and the whole thing works if the lifetime value of a player exceeds what you paid to acquire them. Dream Games did the first part exceptionally well, which is what made the second part worth doing at that scale.

What that spending is worth in Türkiye now

Here is where this stops being a story and starts being a number.

Under Decision No. 10962, advertising an individual game to players abroad is a claimable expense. The rate is 50%, and it rises to 70% when the campaign targets one of the Ministry's 20 target countries, which include the US, the UK, Germany, Japan and South Korea. The cap is 15,000,000 TL of support per product per year, roughly $314,000, with an annual ceiling across all products of 50,000,000 TL.

Those caps mean no studio claims back 70% of a nine figure UA budget. What they do mean is that a studio running the Dream Games playbook today, spending hard on players in exactly the countries on that list, gets a meaningful share of the early years of that spending returned in cash. So does the hosting, and so do the store commissions on the revenue it produces.

We do not know what Dream Games did or did not claim, and we are not going to guess in public about a private company's filings. What we can say is that the category of spending they described as their entire plan for a $155 million round is the same category that Türkiye now pays 50 to 70% of.

Where it ended up

In May 2025, CVC agreed to become the company's sole equity partner in a transaction valuing it at around $5 billion, with debt financing from funds managed by Blackstone and others. The venture investors who had backed it from before Royal Match launched, Balderton, Makers Fund, Index Ventures and IVP, all exited. The five founders kept a majority of the company.

Six years from five people leaving their jobs to a five billion dollar business, on the back of one game.

If you are running a studio and wondering whether the spend side of that story is affordable from Türkiye, the calculator will tell you what your own UA budget is worth under the programme.