Istanbul has become a city to watch when it comes to casual gaming startup, with the likes of Peak and Dream being acquired by Zynga and Dream being valued at $1 billion in a funding round last year. A new startup is about to announce a major round of funding. Spyke Games raised $55 million in a seed round of funding, which it hopes to use to bring a new twist to casual games.
Teams and alliances, clans, tournaments are sticky because they are in the midcore genre. They allow people to play and compete. We think this will happen in casual games as well.
The funding is coming from a single investor that focuses on the games industry and is called Griffin Gaming Partners. It has a portfolio of companies.
This is a big sum for a seed round in any country, but as it happens, it is the largest seed round to date for a startup out of Turkey, underscoring how much has changed in the country when it comes to attracting investment. Peak had raised $19 million in 10 years when it was acquired for $1.8 billion.
Spyke has raised money before it has even launched anything. The first game, Royal Riches, has been out in a limited release and is due to launch globally this month.
The co-founders' track record is one of the reasons for the strong investor interest. Rina Onur Sirinoglu is the co-founder and CEO of Peak, and she is also the chief product officer. COO Remi Onur was previously Peak's head of design, and Barkin Basaran was a senior product manager at Peak.
The round was raised to match the startup's ambitions. The round is outsized for the Turkish market.
She said that Turkey has always been known as a capital-efficient place for startup companies because of the fact that there is a strong pool of engineers coming out of education in the country. Historically, startup have been able to stretch a couple of million dollars.
She said that Spyke decided to take a different approach. She said that they were doing this a second time and thought they had landed on something huge. We want to be one of the largest gaming companies in the world in a short period of time.
Casual gaming is at an interesting crossroads with the arrival of Spyke. The time is ripe to try to disrupt the genre because it has been around for a long time. The big question is whether it will be another casual gaming company or another entity that is also vying for the same engagement hours as casual games.
Sirinoglu said that it was not just competing against the world of other casual games, but also companies like TikTok.
The hugely popular video app has not published any games that you actively play in the app, but it has carved out a place for itself in the gaming community. The Game Room is a games experience where people can watch a live show where high profile people play games. Some people post videos in the app. It feels like it is just a short step further for TikTok to launch games within the app.
She and her co-founders started to see hints of more social elements while still at Peak, something that is why Spyke's basic premise is not just to make more casual games, but to bring in more social elements into the mix.
She said that the team built in social elements into Toy Blast and stumbled on to a community of players.
We noticed a cross pollination between Toy Blast, Toon Blast and other similar games because Peak didn't have the infrastructure. They found user patterns that will be applied at Spyke.
She said that the majority of revenues came from selling virtual items in private chat rooms. Relationships being formed among players were related to games. We want to create technology to keep that activity in our infrastructure.
The decision to leave and build a new company to explore this says a lot about how often the best ideas at startup are easier to explore at a clean slate than trying to carve out a place for disruption within an existing entity. It is all more interesting considering the history of social gaming and the early days of looking to build in social elements by way of Facebook integrations.
Phil Sanderson, the MD of Griffin Gaming, said thatSpyke has the perfect combination of a deeply experienced team with proven success developing games and an uncompromising focus on execution. He joined the board of directors.
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