The boom in investments in mobile studios continues in Turkey. Recently, a local startup Dream Games, known for match-3 Royal Match, received $255 million from investors. As a result, its market value reached $2.75 billion.
Royal Match
The main investor in the Series C financing round was the venture capital company Index Ventures (its portfolio includes seed investments in Figma, Slack, Discord, Patreon and Dropbox).
Makers Fund, IVP, Kora, Balderton Capital and BlackRock have also invested in the studio.
This is the third round of funding for Dream Games over the past year. The previous one was held in June 2021. Then the developer raised $155 million at an estimate of $1 billion. Thus, the capitalization of the studio has almost tripled in six months.
In total, Dream Games has received $468 million from investors to date.
The studio plans to spend the collected money on the development of its only Royal Match game so far. Also, part of the funds will go to the launch of a new title, which will take place later this year. Dream Games does not name the exact release date.
“We follow the same approach as Pixar,” commented studio co—founder and CEO Soner Aydemir. “At the beginning of the journey, Pixar was in no hurry. She produced a cartoon every two or three years. We’ll have the same thing. This year we will focus primarily on Royal Match, but if we have the opportunity to develop other games, we will do them as well.”
Apparently, the Dream Games strategy is working. According to the company, three months after the release (it was March last year), Royal Match entered the top 20 highest-grossing mobile games in the United States, Great Britain and Germany. Later it also became one of the most popular mobile games of the year. According to the AppMagic service, Royal Match earned $195.4 million in total and collected 34.9 million downloads.
The investment in Dream Games is the second major investment in a Turkish mobile studio in a week. On Monday, Spyke Games, a studio of veterans of Riot Games, Peak Games and Zynga, announced the closing of the largest seeding round in the history of the Turkish gaming industry. She raised $55 million.