The Turkish tech ecosystem is booming especially in the last 5 years. We observe a significant growth in the gaming ecosystem with 2 unicorns; Peak Games and Dream Games.
Over a thousand game studios, publishers, accelerators, universities, service providers, strong talent flow, highly active local and foreign investors. The Turkish gaming industry is a true ecosystem from all perspectives.
If we compare with just 10 years ago, gaming was not even considered as an industry in Turkey. The first successful gaming company and the first exit from Turkey was Joygame. It was the year 2013 that the Korean gaming giant Netmarble saw the potential and entered Turkey with the Joygame acquisition. Just 10 years passed and gaming became the leading industry of the country in the tech space. There are many reasons why it happened but today I’m more focused on the future and how this growth in the gaming industry will impact the whole Turkish tech ecosystem.
Gaming Industry uses the technologies at the edge. If there is a new device coming to the market with high specs, you can be sure that there will be multiple games using it. If you face over 30 ms (millisecond) latency in a game players start to complain. When you face over 100 ms players start quitting the game. With billions of downloads, hundred thousands of mobile games competition is at its peak. Small mistakes in the user experience, minor bugs, color of the button or an average digital marketing performance leads to failure. Market entry barrier is super low. Any game developer can start publishing their game in more than 150 countries just through Apple and Google app stores. That is the easiest way of reaching a global audience, but also It brings huge competition. If you want to reach billions of players, you are competing with thousands of game companies which increase the user acquisition cost every day, which also gives players a wide variety.
Every game company needs the stars in their team. This highly competitive environment makes all the professionals working in the game industry turn to a star player or they can’t survive. Game industry professionals are born global, they become very sharp, they are extremely data focused and they know how to improve and polish every piece to reach more users and earn money. These people are experienced in global marketing, localization in multiple languages, designing according to the different cultures, understanding the global expectations and using the technology at the edge just to be one step ahead among the tough competition.
The common perception of the gaming industry is high profitability but it’s only profitable if you are extremely successful.
Now, we have hundreds of successful game companies in Turkey which are beating the Americans, Koreans, Chinese, and Europeans. That means we have thousands of talented people who have accumulated global knowledge. They are very data oriented, very sharp, they are masters of their jobs in terms of user experience, design, content creation, user acquisition, data analytics…
Turkey will enjoy all this accumulated know-how and for sure these talents will start working for other tech verticals and also legacy industries. They will create a MIND SHIFT all over the country. Their accumulated knowhow will create a significant impact and local businesses may turn to a global giant accordingly.
That happened in the past. Japan, Korea, US, UK, all of them have a very strong gaming background. The know-how and talents coming from the gaming industry helped the other sectors think global, act global.
