Why so many game studios came out of Istanbul

Türkiye produces a strange amount of mobile gaming for a country that had almost no games industry fifteen years ago. The usual explanations are cheap engineers and a young population, which are true of a dozen countries that produced nothing comparable.

The more specific answer is that one company sold, and the people inside it did not leave the industry.

What happened in 2020

Zynga announced on 1 June 2020 that it was buying Peak, an Istanbul studio of around a hundred people, for $1.8 billion, split roughly evenly between cash and stock. It was the first Turkish company to sell for more than a billion dollars.

A sale that size does two things to a small market at once. It distributes money to people who are still in their thirties and still interested in games. And it distributes something less visible: a group of people who now know, from having done it, how a mobile game with millions of daily players is operated.

Both went straight back into the same industry.

Where the people went

The clearest case is Dream Games, founded by five colleagues who had worked together at Peak: Eren Şengül, Hakan Sağlam, Soner Aydemir, Serdar Yılmaz and İkbal Namlı. They raised a $7.5 million seed round in November 2019, before they had a game to show anyone. Investors were buying the team's record rather than a product, which tells you what that record was worth.

Spyke Games was founded by Rina Onur Şirinoğlu, a Peak co-founder, and raised $55 million in a seed round in January 2022, one of the largest seed rounds the region had seen. Its staff list drew on people from Peak, Zynga and Riot.

Ace Games was started in 2021 by Hakan Bas, formerly Peak's chief operating officer and a co-founder, and raised $7 million in May 2021. Magic Games was founded by other Peak executives and raised $5 million.

Those are the visible ones. According to data from Startups.watch reported in 2022, people connected to Peak had by then founded 65 companies, of which 28 were in games. Locally the phenomenon acquired a nickname, the Peak Mafia, borrowed from the way people talk about the PayPal alumni in California.

Why the knowledge mattered more than the money

Money is the part everyone notices and the less important half.

Running a mobile game at global scale is an operational discipline rather than a creative one. It means live operations that keep a game fresh for years, retention design measured in fractions of a percent, and buying users profitably at budgets that reach eight figures a year. None of that is in a book. It is learned by doing it, expensively, and mostly by getting it wrong first.

A market where nobody has done that starts every company from zero. A market where a hundred people have done it starts companies that already know which mistakes not to make. That is why the second generation of Turkish studios raised money faster and at higher valuations than the first, and why investors were willing to fund Dream Games with no game.

The second wave was not only Peak

Focusing on one company flatters the story, so here are the limits of it.

Türkiye had studios before Peak and had them alongside it. The domestic market gave a generation of developers somewhere to learn on real users before anyone was selling abroad, and several companies grew out of that without any Peak connection. Others came from the İzmir and Ankara university towns rather than Istanbul at all, which is why the map of Turkish games is wider than the map of Peak alumni.

What Peak supplied was concentration and proof. Concentration, because a hundred people learning the same operational discipline in the same building is not the same as a hundred people learning it separately. Proof, because before June 2020 a foreign investor looking at a Turkish studio was making a bet on a country with no track record, and afterwards they were looking at a market that had produced a billion dollar outcome.

Both of those change what the next founder can raise, and how fast. That is the mechanism, and it is more mundane than the mythology around it.

What the state did, and when

The timing is worth stating plainly, because it cuts against the story a government would prefer.

Presidential Decision No. 5447, the first serious Turkish state programme aimed at the IT and games sector, came into force on 20 April 2022. Peak was founded in 2010, built for a decade and sold in June 2020. Every part of that happened before the programme existed.

So the cluster was not created by incentives. It was created by a domestic market big enough to practise on, a supply of technical graduates, and one outcome large enough to fund the next round of founders.

What changed afterwards is that the same playbook became far cheaper to run. The costs that Peak carried alone for ten years, the user acquisition, the servers, the store commissions, are now reimbursed at 50%, and at 70% for campaigns aimed at the markets most studios already target.

Whether it repeats

The ingredients are not rare in themselves. Plenty of countries have engineers and a young population. What is hard to arrange on purpose is the sequence: a first company that gets big enough to teach a hundred people how it is done, and an outcome that leaves those people with both capital and appetite.

Governments try to shortcut this with office space and grants, which produce office space and grants. Türkiye got the sequence by accident, and then built policy on top of a thing that already worked, which is the right order and an unusual one.

What it means if you are moving a studio here

The practical benefit is not romantic. It is the hiring market.

A studio setting up in Istanbul today is recruiting from a pool that includes producers who have shipped a top-grossing title, user acquisition managers who have run seven-figure monthly budgets, and engineers who have kept live operations running for millions of daily players. Those people exist here in numbers a market this size would not normally support, because the exits happened here and the people stayed.

The tax treatment and the reimbursements make the move worth more. What makes it work at all is who you can hire once you arrive. The calculator covers the first part, and what the 2026 framework changed covers the rules behind it.