How Pixel Flow! led an Istanbul studio to a Scopely deal

On 19 February 2026, Investing.com reported that Scopely had agreed to buy a majority stake in the Istanbul studio behind the mobile puzzle game Pixel Flow!. Kübra Gündoğan (CEO) and Emre Çelik (CTO) founded the studio in 2025. Pixel Flow! launched in late 2025, and by the time of the deal it had passed 10 million users, according to a statement from Scopely.

Scopely's statement also said Pixel Flow! was the only casual game released in the previous 12 months to break into the monthly top 20 grossing chart in the United States. The report put the team at about 20 people.

What Scopely bought

According to Investing.com, Scopely is a US company whose games include Monopoly Go! and Pokémon Go. It is owned by Savvy Games Group, a subsidiary of Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund. In February 2026 it agreed to take a majority stake in the studio that makes Pixel Flow!. The report gave neither the price nor the size of the stake, so this article leaves both out.

The report was clearer on how the studio would run afterwards. The team of roughly 20 people would continue to be led by Gündoğan and Çelik, and it would stay in Istanbul. Investing.com described the deal as expanding Scopely's development capacity in Türkiye, which it called one of the most vibrant gaming hubs in the EMEA region.

Investing.com quoted Tim O'Brien, Scopely's Chief Revenue Officer and a member of its board, as saying the game had "already reached millions of players and climbed the top-grossing charts at remarkable speed."

How the studio got there

According to the report, the team closed a seed round in 2025 with investors including Arcadia Gaming Partners and e2vc. The amount and the lead investor were not reported. In the same year the team shipped Pixel Flow!, a puzzle game built around a mechanic that, in the report's words, "combines both in-app and ad-based elements".

Put in order, the timeline runs like this. The company was set up in 2025, funded the same year, and launched its game in late 2025. By February 2026 that game had more than 10 million users and a place in the US top 20 by revenue, on Scopely's figures, and the studio had agreed a majority sale with its founders still in charge.

For founders reading this from another country, the last detail stands out. Scopely bought into an Istanbul team, and the report says that team stays in Istanbul under the two people who started it.

A pattern Istanbul has seen before

We have written before about Dream Games and about why one American publisher bought three Istanbul studios.

The Pixel Flow! deal was agreed in February 2026, by a studio founded in 2025.

What a game like this spends money on

A casual game that earns from purchases and ads usually carries three large running costs, and each one appears in Decision No. 10962, Türkiye's IT export incentive programme.

The first is user acquisition: paid advertising to bring players into the game. Article 17 covers ads and marketing for digital products at 50%, rising to 70% when the advertising targets a country on the Ministry's target list. The United States is on that list, along with Germany, the United Kingdom, Japan, Canada and others. Support under Article 17 is up to 50,000,000 TL a year, about $1,043,841 at 47.9 lira to the dollar, across up to 10 products a year. Our piece on the 70% rate in target countries goes through how that applies to user acquisition.

The second is store commission. Article 22 pays 50% of app store and platform commissions, with support of up to 20,000,000 TL a year, about $417,537. There is more on this in our post on app store commissions.

The third is hosting: the servers that run the game for players abroad. Article 16 pays 50%, with support of up to 5,000,000 TL a year, about $104,384.

All three are paid as cash in lira, against invoices the company has already paid, whether or not the company is profitable yet. On top of the reimbursements, income from software sold to customers abroad is exempt from Turkish corporate tax under the IT export regime.

An example studio

The figures below describe an example studio based in Türkiye. They have no connection to Pixel Flow! or its team. Say the studio spends $1,200,000 a year on ads aimed at US players, pays $600,000 in store commission and spends $150,000 on hosting.

On those numbers the studio gets $840,000 back on its advertising at the 70% rate, which sits inside the Article 17 cap. Store commission returns $300,000 and hosting returns $75,000. Of $1,950,000 in yearly spend, $1,215,000 comes back as cash.

Timing matters as much as the rate. Each payment has its own six-month filing window, so an invoice paid in May 2026 reaches the end of its window this month. Spend that is not filed in time is lost for good. Studios already operating in Türkiye treat these claims as a routine part of every quarter. CyberScope is an incentives consultancy in Türkiye.

Your own figures

If your studio buys players in the US, pays store commission and runs a live backend, those are the same bills this programme pays against. The calculator shows what would come back on your own spend before you speak to anyone. If you would like to go through the numbers with us, talk to us.