Gaming revenue in Turkey crossed the billion mark in 2021. The market now generates more than $1.2 billion per year. This happened at a time when local games development became one of the top investment sectors in the country.
Total game revenue in the region rose by 26% last year, agency GAMING IN TURKEY said in its latest report. It’s a pretty big step for the market that hasn’t shown such tremendous dynamics in years.
The mobile sector of the gaming market was the main driver for this growth. It grew by 27% to $620 million. The PC games segment also had good results, rising from $230 million in 2020 to $300 million in 2021 (up 23,3%).
Regarding the situation with investment, the local game development community received around $266 million last year. This sum is smaller compared to the 2020 numbers, when Zynga paid $1.8 billion for Peak Games, but still impressive.
To be clear, local game companies raised $2.4 billion between 2015 and 2020. If we take Peak Games’ story out of the equation, we discover that the Turkish games sector received only $600 million through M&A deals in five years. Taking these numbers into account, $266 million raised in a year looks good.
It’s also worth noting that game development has found itself as one of the top entrepreneurship ecosystems in Turkey. The industry is responsible for the majority of IT investment deals in the region (54).
According to the report, game studios accounted for the vast majority of investments (48). 22 out of 48 game companies that received money are developing or publishing mobile games in the hyper-casual genre.
The full research contains more than 200 pages. The majority of them cover different market numbers. So there is no point in going through all the stuff, unless to cover the few basic ones:
- 78% of adults in Turkey play mobile games;
- 52% of mobile gamers are men and 48% are women;
- 46% of mobile gamers play weekly for 10 hours and more;
- 47% of mobile gamers play 2-3 times a day;
- the favorite game genre of mobile players in Turkey is Puzzle / Trivia / Word games;
- there are more than 2636 Turkish publishers on Google Play;
- only 21% of Turkish publishers’ games are available on both Google Play and App Store.
By the way, the WN Conference will take place in Istanbul this June. This event is dedicated to the current state of the Turkish game development sphere and market. You can find out more about it here.