Our Evolving Mobile Gaming Thesis in Türkiye

Our mobile gaming thesis in Türkiye changes every two years because the bottleneck keeps moving.

In 2020-2022, the thesis was almost classical.

Back founders who had done it before, in genres they understood deeply, against very large and well-established markets. Match-3. Merge. Categories with billions in annual revenue.

The bet was not novelty. It was execution.

These teams needed $5-10M, sometimes more, and 18-24 months to launch something worthy of the category. Experience mattered. Taste mattered. Production quality mattered. You were not trying to discover a new behavior. You were trying to take share in a giant existing behavior.

Perfection was the name of the game.

Then 2023-2025 became a different era.

IDFA changed the economics. Interest rates changed investor patience. Payback periods compressed. Hybrid monetization became much more important. The best opportunities were no longer necessarily in the largest genres, but in proven mechanics that were underutilized.

These games would not become $1B annual revenue outcomes. But they could become $100-200M annual revenue businesses. And if a studio could build five of them, you have your unicorn.

This was the era of hyper-polish. Low CPI. Smart ad monetization. Familiar mechanics, made unusually efficient.

Then came the third era.

The marketing stack got commoditized.

UA knowhow used to be a major edge. AppLovin’s dominance has become so strong that even studios doing hundreds of millions in annual revenue often have 80%+ of spend concentrated there. When distribution consolidates like that, analytics advantage compresses.

AppLovin is no longer just a distribution channel. It is becoming an allocation layer. If the allocator sees every game, every cohort, every payback curve, and every creative signal, then the advantage of being marginally better at UA starts to decay.

At the same time, generative AI is commoditizing marketing collateral. The creative machine is getting cheaper, faster and more available to everyone.

So a lot of the value that used to accrue around marketing is leaking away.

The consequence is important: the core mechanic matters more than ever.

If AppLovin already understands your game’s metrics better than you do, and if it can allocate traffic toward the better-performing game faster than the market can respond, then genuine product performance creates a new kind of first-mover advantage. That did not really exist in the same way before.

The core loop becomes more important because it is the part of the company that cannot be bought from the market. You can buy tools, analytics, creative production, and distribution access. You cannot buy taste for a mechanic.

This is why, post-2025, we have become much more interested in studios that can originate mechanics.

Not just improve art. Not just polish liveops. Not just run UA well. Those things still matter, but they no longer define the company.

The real question is: can this team ideate, test, and recognize a new core loop before everyone else?

This changes the founder archetype to one who has played, shipped, killed, and published enough games to recognize a mechanic before it becomes obvious, often having tried thousands of games and comes from hyper-casual.

What comes next?

My guess is AI-native studios. Not studios that “use AI.” Everyone will say they use AI. That is exactly why most will underuse it.

The next great gaming companies will be built with AI at the center of the operating system. Ideation, prototyping, art, testing, iteration, liveops, content, personalization.

They will not be 20% faster. They will try ideas 10x faster.

And in the next era of mobile gaming, speed of learning may become the only edge.

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