Gaming startups — specifically those building casual mobile games — are very hot in Turkey right now, and today another one is announcing a sizeable round just nine months into its existence. Grand Games, the publisher behind Magic Sort and Car Match, has picked up $30 million in funding — money that it will use to repeat the pattern it set up to create its first two titles: hire more talent to set up in small clusters to take ownership of developing their own games
Bekir Batuhan Çelebi, the CEO and co-founder of Grand Games who goes by Batu, says that while Grand Games is leaning into using tech from the likes of Midjourney for artwork and OpenAI to write some of its codebase to speed up the process of building games, it is the company’s concept of how to motivate its teams and give them the license to execute on ideas — modelled on Supercell, the casual gaming behemoth from Finland — that makes the tech work as well as it does.
“It’s all about the team culture we are building,” Batu said in an interview.
London-based Balderdon is leading this Series A, with participation also from previous backers Bek Ventures (formerly Earlybird Digital East) and Laton Ventures (which led a $3 million seed last year), plus angel investor Mert Gür.
Grand Games is not disclosing valuation, but for some general context:
- We heard from sources that the round was oversubscribed and investors were competing to get in.
- The funding is one of the more sizeable Series A rounds for a gaming startup out of the country.
- Most notably, less than a month ago, Agave Games announced an $18 million Series A (which Balderton also co-led), which valued it at around $100 million.
- One of Grand Games’ titles, Magic Sort, has broken into the Apple top-selling casual gaming charts; and together its two titles have pulled in more than $4 million in gross app revenues in the six months since they’ve been published, the company said.
The fact that Grand Games is raising any money at all makes it somewhat of an outlier in its category.
Perhaps because so many casual gaming startups generate revenues early on, and so many of them are built on cost bases more modest than those of larger games, many of the companies (or sole-trader developers) tend to stay off the radar when it comes to funding, instead opting to go via the bootstrapped route. In the current charts for most popular casual and puzzle games on Apple’s App Store, only a handful of the developers are venture-backed. That list includes Dream Games and Supercell.
Dream Games is a key name here. It also hails from Turkey and is one of a cluster of companies that have grown out of the success of Peak Games, which Zynga acquired in 2020 for $1.8 billion. Peak and Dream — last raised $255 million — have set the bar for what other founders are aiming for in terms of business growth. Others in the same ecosystem include Tripledot; Spyke, which raised $50 million earlier this year (it had launched with $55 million in funding before releasing even a single title); Agave and Good Job.
Good Job, in fact, is where the three founders of Grand Games got their start. Batu, Mustafa Fırtına and Mehmet Çalım were all working together there when they came up with the idea of building Grand, Batu said.
As Batu describes it, typically in the Turkish gaming world, game design decisions are made by founders. Those founders might be very smart and ambitious but it left a lot on the table, giving “really capable, high caliber people” — their employees — very little license in what they are working on, he said.
Grand’s three founders’ bet was that if they could build a structure where they hired smart people to take on most of the decision making in clusters around single titles, that would result in more productive work, better games, and ultimately happier employees.
“The culture we are trying to implement into gaming,” he said, has become what Batu describes as “its biggest separator” among gaming companies in Istanbul.
“And it is not unheard of, by the way. Supercell has been doing it for more than 10 years, but I don’t think it is seen in the Turkish gaming industry,” he added.
They also lean heavily on AI tools to take on some of the more time-consuming work around various art work ideas and writing code to give those teams more time to be creative.
“I only intervene in five to ten percent of the decisions they are making,” Batu said of the two clusters that exist at Grand today. Those interventions might be to step in if there are fundamental disagreements that cannot be resolved, or might be to call time on a project that just hasn’t worked.
So far, given that Grand Games is less than a year old, it hasn’t had many challenges to this structure: it’s only worked on two games and both are now out in the world and doing very well. (Cue investors banging on its door.)
The big question will be whether Grand Games can sustain that track record as it brings on more staff and creates more of these production clusters. Investors are willing to bet that there is a good chance it will.
“Istanbul is producing some of the world’s finest gaming studios and within that ecosystem the founders of Grand Games stood out with their vision to create world-class genre-defining casual games that players love to play,” said Suranga Chandratillake, General Partner at Balderton Capital, in a statement. “The speed with which they have built a brilliant team culture and achieved success with their first two games demonstrates their talent and commitment. We are excited to be working with a team with sky-high ambition and passion for gaming.”
