Ertan Duman

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I’m excited to announce the launch of a new series where I'll be sharing my insights and perspectives on the latest developments in the gaming and ad tech industry. In our first piece, I’ll explore the factors behind the Turkish gaming industry's remarkable boom ⬇️ 1. The Turkish government puts money back into the gaming industry - Thanks to the lack of capital gains tax and some employees' exemptions from income tax, money is being reinvested in the games sector. - As announced by Tugbek Olek earlier this year, the government is also covering 50% of two development staff's salaries up to €50k and reimbursing Apple's and Google Play's 30% commission up to 50% and €100k.    2. A young, gaming-focused population  - A 2022 study found that 81% of adults in Turkey play mobile games. And with 44% of the population under the age of 30, a vast majority of the workforce attended Turkish universities and studied abroad – coming back with an international and entrepreneurial mindset. They were able to apply their ideas and create some of the great games companies we see today like Dream Games, Peak, Spyke Games, Masomo and on the hyper/hybrid casual side Rollic, Alictus, Good Job Games and Panteon. 3. International investors  - Building off the support from the government, external investors are becoming more open to investing in Turkey. And with more money coming in, better games will be developed. - If money is kept in the sector, there's a very high chance international companies will reinvest, and now we are seeing the results in the form of a thriving gaming hub. When I started out in the industry in 2012, it was just a matter of time until Turkey became a big name in gaming. Now I'm looking forward to seeing where not only the giants will develop, but also keeping an eye on Fugo Games, Vertigo Games, Fomo Games, Gamegos, Tiramisu Studios and Zuuks Games. 

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💫 Turkey’s gaming scene is growing fast, with over 30 million gamers. I really believe it’s a great opportunity for international game studios or game products! Here’s how to connect with Turkey’s young, tech-savvy gamers: -Go Local: Tailor your content to fit the Turkish culture. -Social Media: Use platforms like Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok to reach them. -Influencer Collaborations: Partner with popular Turkish gamers and streamers. -Get Involved: Participate in local gaming events and online tournaments. The Turkish market is full of energy and opportunity. Want to know more? Let’s chat about it. 👊 #GameMarketing #Turkey #GamingCommunity

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15 Insightful take aways from Mobidictum that you want to hear: ✦ Location was great and everyone was happy with it. ↳ Easy to get in and out (besides Istanbul traffic). ↳ Breakfast and lunch were amazing, coffee was not. ✦Major stakeholders from last year with big booths: ↳ Were only present with their business developers and some didn’t even show up, that’s not good. ✦Pretty much every game tech is looking for a game developer who has ‘’potential’’. Where are they? ↳ Probably at home, working on the game. ✦While these developers looking for investment: ↳ because publisher deals and trust is damaged. ✦Meanwhile investors looking for early metrics and staying away from new developers, ↳ So whole thing is ‘’TANGLED’’ ✦There were almost only B2B people, so whoever you ↳ run in to has either something to sell or buy. ✦Great positive vibes among all people on the floor. ✦Too little time, too many people to meet: ↳ so I missed almost all keynotes. ✦I didn’t see any AI or ‘’blockchain’’ people. ↳ Where did they go? ✦User Acquisition is a ‘’hot’’ topic and companies ↳ offering alternative UA channels has increased. ✦Self Publisher is the word everyone talks about ↳ but only few know what it means. ✦Almost all gametech companies offer a referral ↳ its like people are hiding a good studio under  their basement and chasing these offers. Are they? ✦Turkish Indie PC games are looking better! ↳Yet haven’t seen a unique gameplay, yet. ✦There are MAJOR game studio shifts between ↳ well known publishers as some of them are increasing their presence in Turkey, again while others looking for something else. => Whole TANGLED situation will be solved with One or two hit games coming from the area (mobile) By a small studio, again. Everyone is looking for them, while they are quietly working on it. For more, hit me up and let’s talk! Was your experience better than last year? Cheers! PS: Met many wonderful people again, Jakub Remiar and Felix Braberg were there. It was good to see Ömer Yakabagi but missed Yağız Gür. Many surprise names and ex-colleagues(Rollic) I cant name, but they were browsing, let me just tell you that. Special thanks to Batuhan Avucan and whole Mobidictum team for their hospitality, Emre Çakan, Sina and Yunus AYYILDIZ for sharing the stage. Looking forward to see more industry professionals next year like Sergei Vasiuk, Anton Slashcev and many more. Also there were few closed events, thanks to Alp Geven for the invite! #videogames #gameindustry #conferences

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🇹🇷 I started analyzing 250 PC Games under ‘’Land of the Crescent 2024’’ on Steam, all made by Turkish Developers! -Wow! This is the biggest Turkish PC Games Sale event. As the analysis will go on, more details will reveal. I spent hours creating a custom list, partnered with Video Game Insights on this precious analysis, Hoping to shed light on the industry. 👇 Steam link on the comments So far here are the questions you may ask: >Is the Turkish PC Game Development going good? -Yes, it could be better, but yes. We are learning. >Did majority of mobile developers turned in to PC? -No, they did not. Some of them did, while majority Continues on mobile development. >Is this all the Turkish PC Games developed? -No it is not, there is more, just not listed here. >Are they all making Simulator or Horror games? -No they are not, Action is a big focus though. >Are they all Indie and recently released? -We have AAA and AA, mostly indie. All these games were released in different years. We are working to sort Year-Release analysis. This is barely a scratch on the analysis, many games have only been announced, but still listed. Stay tuned for more updates. Best of luck and kudos to all developers listed! CHEERS! DM me for questions, suggestions or just comment! PS: Cultic Games thanks for the great illustration. Thanks to BUG Lab TEKMER for putting together this event on Valve corporation's Steam Land of the Crescent: Games from Türkiye #videogames #gameindustry

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🚀 Excited to announce that I’ll be joining Sertac Picakci for a fireside chat at the upcoming Mobidictum Gaming Event in Istanbul! 🎮🔥 We’ll be diving into a topic that’s at the core of every successful gaming business: the relationship between marketing and product. In today’s hyper-competitive gaming landscape, it’s more important than ever to align product development with marketing strategies that truly resonate with players. I’m looking forward to sharing insights, lessons learned, and actionable takeaways from my years in the gaming industry alongside Sertac’s expertise. Whether you’re focused on game design, user acquisition, or player retention, this is a conversation you won’t want to miss. See you in Istanbul! #Mobidictum2024 #GamingIndustry #MarketingAndProduct #Gamedev #FiresideChat

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I heard the best way to reach an audience of gaming creators is to talk about what you are working on publicly. So that’s what I’m going to do. I’m the co-founder and producer of Metis Creative - one of the biggest Indie Gaming Studios you probably haven’t heard of from Istanbul. Here is our story: 🔺 We do tabletop - a classical gaming medium that made a huge comeback. We are in no rush for digitalizing our games. 🔺 We are crowdfunding veterans. We received no investor money because we needed no investor money. Our seed capital was me selling my old busted PS4. I will keep evangelising this path for all Indies. 🔺 Everything we create for our flagship IP; art, worldbuilding, soundtracks, quest or narrative design plays for the top spot in at least the national gaming scene. 🔺 Our flagship IP, Historica Arcanum is designed to have a strong staying power. Good IPs create loyal fans, loyal fans allow you to snowball, that’s our strategy. 🔺 We do every asset in-house. We retain and nurture talent. 🔺 We doubled our revenue every year, for the last three years. This year seems to be no different. The same goes for our studio size. 🔺 Our release schedule was one major release per year - though with our current resources we are doubling up on yearly releases. Let me know if you would want me to talk about any specific part of our playbook. I intend to make posts like this occasionally to log our progress and inspire new creators in the space!

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Startups are already raising money for Telegram-based games 🤔 Last week, I wrote about the phenomenal success of Hamster Kombat, which hit 110 million MAU and made Telegram one of the biggest platforms for play-to-earn games. Today, while looking through the deals for an upcoming InvestGame report we are preparing, I came across several investments targeting Telegram-based games — something I hadn’t noticed until recently! While some startups like PlaysOut and Animoca’s Gamee raised funds to publish multi-genre games for their Telegram mini-apps, others clearly took more inspiration from the recent success of Notcoin and Hamster Kombat.  🐹 For example, Anomaly raised $1.45M in May’24 for ‘play-to-airdrop’ games, while Akedo secured funding for its ‘tap-to-earn’ game Akedog — both heavily influenced by Notcoin and Hamster Kombat. Some of the investors in these rounds are Yuga Labs, Kenetic Capital, 4399 Games, Mozaik Capital, and TON Ventures — all Web3-focused. 🔗 I expected to see terms like ‘tap-to-earn‘ and ‘play-to-airdrop‘ in investment announcements, but I’m surprised how soon this happened! 👉 On the one hand, I understand the urgency for investors to diversify and be early on the growing platform. 👉 But on the other hand, didn’t we learn anything from the Web3 investment hype of 2021-2022? I’d love to hear your thoughts on these investments in the comments 💬

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That sounds about right. And here is the link to the actual paper: https://lnkd.in/d8njuUnV

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💥 Hi everyone, We often talk about Turkish games coming to the USA, but what about USA games going to Turkey and the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) regions? There are huge opportunities here! Why Turkey and MENA? - Turkey: Over 32 million gamers! The market could make over $1.5 billion by 2024. - MENA: More than 100 million gamers! The market might be worth over $6 billion by 2024. Why Bring Your Game There? - Diverse Players: Gamers in Turkey and MENA like all kinds of games, from mobile to big console games. - High Engagement: Players are very active on social media and gaming forums. - Strong Purchasing Power in MENA: Gamers in that region is ready to spend money on good games. - Government Support: Countries like Saudi Arabia and UAE support the gaming industry with incentives. Why Now? - Better Internet: Improved internet and more smartphones make gaming easier. - Cultural Relevance: Games that include local themes or languages can become popular quickly. - Esports Growth: The rise of esports offers more chances for competitive games. Let's Talk! Are you a game developer interested in new markets? Let's discuss the potential of bringing your game to Turkey and the MENA region. There are great opportunities! #GameMarketing #Turkey #MENA #GameDevelopers

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Yet more funding is finding its way to Istanbul’s gaming startups. Today, Dream Games — the casual games developer behind the hit game Royal Match — is announcing a $255 million Series C that values the startup at $2.75 billion. This Series C is being led by Index Ventures, with Makers Fund, IVP, funds and accounts managed by BlackRock, Kora and Balderton Capital also participating. The funding will be used both to continue investing in and developing Royal Match, and to work on its next launch, which is expected later this year. Today’s news comes just six months after Dream Games raised $155 million at a $1 billion valuation (that round was led by Index and Makers Fund), and one day after another Istanbul games startup, Spyke, announced a $55 million seed round. Dream and Spyke share some DNA: Both were founded by people who were either founders or senior members of the team at Peak Games, another gaming startup that was acquired by Zynga in 2020 for $1.8 billion. Royal Match is currently one of the highest grossing mobile games on the market. It will be worth watching to see how and if Dream Games follows it up. From what the company has said in the past, and today, those follow ups might not necessarily come in the form of more games in rapid succession, but in extending the franchises that are already successful and spacing out new developments over periods of years with less pressure to produce new titles over months. “We believe in Pixar’s approach,” co-founder and CEO Soner Aydemir said in an interview in June. “When Pixar started, it was very low frequency, a movie every 2-3 years but eventually the rate increased. And it will be similar for us. This year we need to focus on Royal Match but if we can find a way to create other games, we will.” As with Spyke’s view that its big competition might be the TikToks of the world, not just other games developers, so too does Dream eye up the entertainment industry as a bigger competitive threat. Indeed that’s not just because they too can publish games and build sticky brands, but they are after the same slice of leisure time as Dream among consumers. “The success and growth of Royal Match exceeded all of our expectations,” said Stephane Kurgan, the Index Ventures partner who led the investment, and former chief operating officer at King, in a statement. “In eight months, Royal Match has become one of the most played mobile games of 2021. Dream Games has assembled one of the best teams in the industry, with a rare combination of creative talent, engineering expertise and relentless work ethic. They’ve already shifted the norms around what counts as excellence in mobile gaming, and we’re excited to see where they go next.” Source : https://lnkd.in/eb-bcXDk

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Yet more funding is finding its way to Istanbul’s gaming startups. Today, Dream Games — the casual games developer behind the hit game Royal Match — is announcing a $255 million Series C that values the startup at $2.75 billion. This Series C is being led by Index Ventures, with Makers Fund, IVP, funds and accounts managed by BlackRock, Kora and Balderton Capital also participating. The funding will be used both to continue investing in and developing Royal Match, and to work on its next launch, which is expected later this year. Today’s news comes just six months after Dream Games raised $155 million at a $1 billion valuation (that round was led by Index and Makers Fund), and one day after another Istanbul games startup, Spyke, announced a $55 million seed round. Dream and Spyke share some DNA: Both were founded by people who were either founders or senior members of the team at Peak Games, another gaming startup that was acquired by Zynga in 2020 for $1.8 billion. Royal Match is currently one of the highest grossing mobile games on the market. It will be worth watching to see how and if Dream Games follows it up. From what the company has said in the past, and today, those follow ups might not necessarily come in the form of more games in rapid succession, but in extending the franchises that are already successful and spacing out new developments over periods of years with less pressure to produce new titles over months. “We believe in Pixar’s approach,” co-founder and CEO Soner Aydemir said in an interview in June. “When Pixar started, it was very low frequency, a movie every 2-3 years but eventually the rate increased. And it will be similar for us. This year we need to focus on Royal Match but if we can find a way to create other games, we will.” As with Spyke’s view that its big competition might be the TikToks of the world, not just other games developers, so too does Dream eye up the entertainment industry as a bigger competitive threat. Indeed that’s not just because they too can publish games and build sticky brands, but they are after the same slice of leisure time as Dream among consumers. “The success and growth of Royal Match exceeded all of our expectations,” said Stephane Kurgan, the Index Ventures partner who led the investment, and former chief operating officer at King, in a statement. “In eight months, Royal Match has become one of the most played mobile games of 2021. Dream Games has assembled one of the best teams in the industry, with a rare combination of creative talent, engineering expertise and relentless work ethic. They’ve already shifted the norms around what counts as excellence in mobile gaming, and we’re excited to see where they go next.” Source : https://lnkd.in/eb-bcXDk

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I think that CPC ads are useless. After working in the marketing industry for the past 7 years- in Istanbul, Tokyo, and after speaking with PR manager from the company Publicis I no longer believe in CPC advertising the way I did before… Cost per click is a great thing to do when you have everything else figured out. In 2024 you’d have a hard time equaling ad spend to returns. Yea I mean there is the obvious, Meta, Google are businesses of their own so they don’t really sell you ad space for purchases, rather they sell ad real estate. You can dive into ads targeting and copy. The best result you’ll get from any ads is the stuff that has nothing to do with budget or product- it’s creatives and content. AIDA, PAS, 4Cs, take your pick. The #1 advice for a business or brand in 2024 who has under 100K a year in sales Build your organic content, stick to one channel.

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You might already know that Flowwow has a thriving presence in Turkey through our domain, https://flowwow.com.tr/. Our SEO team has been optimising this site, and we recently uncovered an interesting finding. Our May 2024 search engine revenue breakdown revealed a whopping 30% of our Turkish income coming from Yandex! This is quite unusual for a European country, where Google usually reigns supreme. Recognising this opportunity, we've shifted our focus to optimising for Yandex's ‘behavioural factor’ since the end of May. This factor plays a crucial role in Yandex's ranking algorithm. The results were not long in coming. Check out the card below to see for yourself⬇️ This experience highlights the importance of understanding local search engine landscapes when crafting a successful SEO strategy. #seo #turkeyseo #data #marketing

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Excited to Attend the Mobidictum Conference in Istanbul Next Week! 🇹🇷 I'm thrilled to announce that I'll be heading to Istanbul for the Mobidictum Conference next week! 🎉 I'll be presenting a talk on the State of Hybrid Casual Games with Jakub, where I'll cover: - Ad Formats Used by the Highest Scaling Games 📊 - Exploring the most effective ad formats that top-performing hybrid casual games are leveraging to maximize revenue and user engagement. - Segmentation Formats and Their Impact on Ad Revenue 📈 Diving into the various segmentation strategies available and how they influence different ad revenue percentages, helping you optimize your monetization approach. See you in Istanbul! 🕌✨ #Mobidictum2024 #HybridCasualGames #GameDev #AdMonetization #MobileGaming #Segmentation #GameDesign #GamingIndustry #Istanbul #Conference #Networking #MobileAds

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EURO 2024 is almost here! ⚽️ As you may already know, one way to increase user engagement and user interaction is to pay attention to popular international events. As I've already mentioned in my newsletter, you can create a high level of engagement by changing the theme and mood of your portal in accordance with important events and, even more importantly, publishing appropriate event-related contents. Now is the time to give your users some of the most addictive Football games of the HTML5 games market. Have a quick look at these premium football games! #EURO2024 #FootballGames

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Transform Gaming is doing something truly special in the gaming world. Not only focusing on making social gaming better for players, but they’re also committed to a bigger, more important goal: helping people who struggle with gambling. By working with gambling operators and using neurometrics, they’re creating tools to detect problem gambling early and guide people toward the safer world of mobile gaming.

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How we're educating game developers and building the future of game development. For example at Istanbul Blockchain Week we hosted two groundbreaking events that highlight our commitment to advancing blockchain gaming. Here's what we created for developers: Day 1: Community Building ↳ Open networking event ↳ Developer meetups ↳ Idea exchange sessions ↳ Team introductions Day 2: Professional Development → Interactive workshops → Expert panel discussions → Special ceremony: First-ever physical certificate awards for our training course graduates Why this matters? We believe in building success through education. Whether it's: - Workshop learning - Panel discussions - One-on-one mentoring Every interaction is an opportunity to grow together in the blockchain gaming space. This is just the beginning of our journey in revolutionizing game development education.

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