Peak Games: the $1.8 billion exit that changed Turkish gaming

On 1 June 2020, Zynga announced it was buying an Istanbul studio for $1.8 billion, split roughly evenly between cash and Zynga stock. It was the first time a Turkish company had sold for more than a billion dollars.

The studio was Peak. It had about a hundred people in it.

Ten years, and not the ten you would expect

Sidar Şahin founded Peak in 2010. The first version of the company was not the one that got bought. Peak spent its early years making social and card games, including Turkish card games like Okey and Batak that were enormously popular at home and meant very little anywhere else.

That business worked. In 2017 Peak sold it to Zynga, reportedly for around $100 million, and kept the rest of the company.

Selling your profitable division to the company that will eventually buy the whole thing is an unusual move. It gave Peak two things: money, and the freedom to bet everything on the part of the business it thought had a bigger ceiling. Puzzle games.

Two games

Toy Blast launched in 2015. Toon Blast followed in 2017. Both are match-and-collapse puzzle games, and to a casual eye they look like a hundred other games in the same category.

They were not. By June 2020 the two of them together had more than 12 million average mobile daily active users, and both sat consistently near the top of the grossing charts in the US and other major markets. Zynga's announcement said the acquisition would increase its own daily active users by around 60%.

Read that again with the team size in mind. A hundred people. Two games. Twelve million people playing every day.

That ratio is the actual story of Peak, and it is the thing Turkish studios have been quietly good at ever since: small teams, few products, very deep operational discipline on the ones they run.

Frank Gibeau, Zynga's CEO at the time, put it plainly in the announcement: "Peak is one of the world's best puzzle game makers and we could not be more excited to add such creative and passionate talent to our company."

Şahin's line was the one that got quoted in Türkiye for the next year: "This is a monumental partnership not only for Zynga and Peak, but for the whole mobile gaming industry."

What it changed

Before Peak, a Turkish founder raising money abroad had to explain why a games company in Istanbul was a reasonable idea. After Peak, they did not.

The deal closed on 1 July 2020. Within eighteen months there were Turkish studios raising at billion dollar valuations from London and San Francisco funds, and at least one of them was founded by five people who had worked at Peak. That connection is not a coincidence, and where the Peak people went traces it properly.

The part that is relevant to you

The timing is the interesting part, and it is the reason this post sits on an incentives website.

Presidential Decision No. 5447, the first serious Turkish state programme aimed at the IT and games sector, came into force on 20 April 2022. Zynga announced the Peak deal on 1 June 2020, almost two years earlier.

Everything that built Peak, which is to say a decade of development, a decade of server bills, and the very large user acquisition budget that took two puzzle games to the top of the US charts, happened before that programme existed at all. Peak paid for all of it out of its own revenue.

A studio running that same playbook from Türkiye today is in a different position. Under Decision No. 10962, advertising a game to players abroad comes back at 50%, and at 70% when the campaign targets one of the Ministry's 20 target countries, a list that includes the US, the UK, Germany, Japan and South Korea. Store commissions come back at 50%. So do the servers.

We are not going to pretend that a reimbursement programme makes anyone the next Peak. It does not, and the hard parts of that story were the product decisions, not the finance. But the specific costs that Peak carried alone for ten years are the exact costs the Turkish state now covers a large share of, and a founder deciding where to build the next one should know that.

If you want to see what your own numbers look like against it, the calculator takes about a minute.