All inclusive: how the Turkish company Dream Games raised the round of $50M without a finished product

We recently talked about the popularity of fantasy sports. However, gaming can no longer be called gaming without a segment of mobile games. According to statistics from October 2020, puzzle games have become one of the highest grossing genres of mobile games. Last October alone, the leader of the Candy Crush Saga genre was making an average of over $1.8M per day.

Today, Turkey is one of the strongest hubs for the development of mobile games (especially puzzles). Last year Zynga, the largest player among mobile gaming companies, acquired the Istanbul-based startup Peak Games for $1.8B. Zynga then acquired Rollic — another Turkish mobile games company.

In 2019, the guys from Peak Games launched their own Dream Games studio, which raised round A of $50M. It is noteworthy that by the time of the deal, the studio had not launched a single game. Index Ventures led the round with the participation of Balderton Capital and Makers Fund — the last two funds participated in the previous series for $7.5M. Index Ventures is known for its investments in Discord, King, Roblox, Supercell and the company from the author of Angry Birds, Rovio.

The fact that Dream Games CEO Soner Aydemir is a former director of products at Peak Games helped to believe in the company, which has not yet launched a single product that would be profitable. It was he who had a hand in the studio's two hits, Puzzles Toy Blast and Toon Blast. He hired leading Peak employees as co-founders. Also, a test launch of the first product - Royal Match showed good metrics.

Aydemir calls his company "entertainment", and puzzles are just a small part of the planned volume of products. In his words, to make a cult game, it is enough to "combine engineering, art, data science and quality user engagement with a strong marketing approach." This approach, perfected, according to Index Ventures representatives, attracted investors. Launched the other day, Royal Match is also to their taste: now they expect only Dream Games to grow.