Although the story of entrepreneurship in the gaming industry in Türkiye doesn’t go back that far, it has gained a serious momentum especially since the mid-2010s with mobile and social games. Reaching its “peak” point in the last five years and hosting the country’s first “Unicorn” companies, the Turkish Gaming Industry has managed to achieve significant growth by combining this acceleration with the positive effects of the pandemic on the global gaming industry. In 2022, it’s possible to say that the industry had a challenging year due to global economic and political fluctuations, commercial crises and the changing priorities of gamers.
Related: Hyper-casual downloads decline 24% while hybrid-casual numbers go up
Türkiye Game Market Report, which has been published continuously since 2016 by the Gaming in Turkey team founded by Ozan Aydemir, makes a detailed analysis of the year 2022, which has been quite turbulent and the effects of which seem inevitable to extend to the current year & beyond. The 230-page report includes an overview of the country, player habits, media investments, social routines of players, and a detailed analysis of Turkish and global gaming companies.
It was a tough year, what about after?
To mention some of the most interesting statistics in the report, it seems that although the number of players increased by 5% (from 42 million to 44 million) compared to 2021, this was not reflected in revenues. The total revenues, which were announced as 152 billion dollars (2019) and 177 billion dollars (2020) in previous years, did not increase as expected in 2021, and the total size of the industry was realized as 176 billion dollars. In 2022, the total of these revenues totaled $ 185 billion, and almost half of them were generated from mobile games (more than $ 92 billion). Console and PC revenues follow mobile platforms far behind. Apart from this, the channels that received the most investment along with the gaming sector were Artificial Intelligence and Fintech.
Stating that there are 69 million social media users and 72 million active internet users in Turkey, one of the important lines in the report is on the share of advertisements. Accordingly, the share of television adverts in the total decreased from 28% to 26%, while the share of digital adverts increased from 65% to 67%.
The report also includes the opinions of many professionals about the Turkish Gaming Industry. Batuhan Avucan, Founder and General Manager of Mobidictum, said, “The market is slowing down, layoffs continue one after another and this period may last until June 2023. Salaries are not as high as before as well. I predict that companies with weak financing will struggle and their talents might shift to stronger ones. In the long run, the market will push the weak out of the market and strengthen the strong even more. The hyper-casual market has already slowed down and we see consequences of this here in Turkey. Large hyper-casual publishers are exploring to different business models by focusing on hybrid-casual and casual games. In Turkey, we see a lot of new studios being established as well as closing studios, and in this period, valuations will likely fall, but entrepreneurs who know the business well and build a good team will still be able to access financing somehow. We see companies that want to leave the “mobile race”, now pushing to develop games for PC and console. From all these perspectives, 2023 will also be the year of independent game developers.” He commented.
You can read the English version of the report on Gaming in Turkey’s page.
