The hyper-casual wave that came out of Türkiye

The billion dollar Turkish gaming stories get told often. The hyper-casual wave that ran alongside them gets told rarely, and it is arguably the more useful one to understand, because the deals were smaller, there were more of them, and the business model maps onto the incentive programme almost perfectly.

Between late 2020 and early 2022, three separate foreign buyers came to Türkiye for hyper-casual studios. None of them bought the same company, and they did not all shop in Istanbul.

Who bought what

Rollic, based in Istanbul, was acquired by Zynga and became its hyper-casual arm. It then went shopping itself.

Uncosoft, the studio behind High Heels!, was acquired by Rollic in a deal that closed on 29 April 2021. Uncosoft was founded in 2018 by Edip Enes Çakır and based in İzmir rather than Istanbul. Terms were not disclosed.

Ruby Games, also in İzmir and also founded in 2018, was acquired by Rovio, the Finnish company behind Angry Birds, in a deal announced on 12 August 2021. The structure is worth reading, because it shows how these companies were valued. Rovio took 20% of the shares first for $10 million in cash, then up to 50% more for as much as $80 million, split 60% cash and 40% Rovio shares and contingent on performance through October 2022, with the remaining 30% acquired over five years. At the time of the deal Ruby had generated $7.8 million in the first half of 2021 across thirteen games and around 600 million downloads, and its Hunter Assassin had been the sixth most downloaded game worldwide in 2020.

Alictus, based in Ankara, was acquired by SciPlay for $100 million.

Four studios, three buyers, three cities. The Istanbul story is real but it is not the whole map.

Why the model suited Türkiye

Hyper-casual is not really a development business. Games are cheap and fast to make, the great majority fail, and the winners are discovered by building many of them and testing each with paid traffic until one shows the retention and cost per install that justify scaling.

That makes the discipline a marketing one. The skills that decide whether a studio succeeds are creative testing, media buying and reading cohort data quickly, rather than large production budgets or long schedules.

Türkiye had an unusual amount of exactly that. A generation of people had already learned to buy users profitably at scale, costs were low enough to run many experiments, and the technical talent to build a prototype in weeks was widely available. A model that rewards cheap iteration and disciplined buying found a market built for it.

The part that matters commercially

This history belongs on a site about incentives, not only in a games publication, and the reason is in the cost structure.

Strip a hyper-casual studio to its costs and you find two large lines and not much else. The first is user acquisition, which is most of the business. The second is the commission the platform takes on whatever you sell or the advertising revenue you earn through it. Salaries matter, but the model is deliberately light on them.

Both of those large lines are claimable.

Article 17 of Decision No. 10962 reimburses advertising, promotion and marketing aimed abroad for a specific game at 50%, and Article 44 raises that to 70% where the campaign targets one of the Ministry's target countries, a list that includes the markets these studios sell into. Article 22 covers the platform commissions at 50%.

For a business whose costs are mostly media spend, that is a structural change rather than a rebate. A studio testing thirty games a year and scaling two is running a portfolio where most of the spend produces nothing, and recovering half to seventy percent of it alters how many shots you can take before a winner has to appear.

A worked portfolio

Numbers make the point faster than the argument does. Take a studio running the model properly over a year:

• $1,400,000 testing roughly thirty prototypes, most of which are killed within days
• $2,600,000 scaling the three that showed workable retention and cost per install
• $700,000 in platform commissions on what those three earned

Nearly all of the testing and scaling spend is aimed at players in the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany, which are on the Ministry's target list, so that advertising is reimbursed at 70% rather than 50%.

The $4,000,000 of media spend returns $2,800,000, subject to the per-product cap of 15,000,000 TL, about $314,000, on each individual title. The commissions return $350,000 at 50%, against a cap of 4,000,000 TL per title.

The caps are what decide the answer here, and they decide it in a specific way: this programme rewards a portfolio rather than a single hit. A studio that puts everything behind one title hits the per-product ceiling and stops. A studio spreading the same budget across ten titles claims against ten separate ceilings. Hyper-casual is already a portfolio business, which is why the fit is unusually good.

What changed since

The wave that produced these deals ran on margins that no longer exist in the same form. Advertising rates rose, privacy changes made attribution harder, and much of the industry moved towards hybrid models that keep the cheap acquisition but add in-app purchases to deepen the revenue per player.

The cost structure did not change. The spending is still front-loaded into media, and the failure rate is still high by design.

So the reimbursement is worth more now than it was when the deals above were signed, not less. When margins were generous, recovering half of your user acquisition was a bonus. When they are thin, it is the difference between a portfolio strategy that works and one that does not.

What to take from it

Three foreign acquirers found Turkish hyper-casual studios worth buying inside about eighteen months, and they found them in three different cities. The talent was never confined to one place, and neither is the programme, which pays identically from any address in the country.

If you are running this model, the item to look at first is advertising for your own titles, because it is where the money is and where the target country rate applies. The calculator will show what a year of your own testing budget is worth against it.