As Zynga buys Istanbul-based Rollic Games for $168M, a look at the rapid growth of hyper-casual mobile games, where publishers may launch a new title every week
Tim Bradshaw / Financial Times :
Context & Ripple Effects
This is Zynga's third purchase of an Istanbul studio in three years, following the $100M Peak Games card-studio deal in 2017 and the $250M Gram Games acquisition in 2018 — a deliberate pipeline into Turkey's mobile talent pool rather than a one-off. What Rollic adds is the hyper-casual operating model itself: publishers launching a new title every week and letting usage data decide what scales.
The timing matters because Zynga's legacy portfolio is under strain — sales of its top five games by revenue have fallen 23%, and it is leaning on mechanics like a secretive VIP program with personal account managers to keep spenders engaged in games like FarmVille. A weekly-release hit machine is the growth engine the older portfolio no longer provides.
First-order effects
- Zynga immediately gains a hyper-casual launch cadence it did not have internally, diversifying away from aging franchises whose top-five revenue is down 23%.
- Rollic's Istanbul team gets Zynga's distribution and ad monetization scale, while Zynga deepens its concentration of acquired Turkish studios to at least three (Peak's card unit, Gram, Rollic).
Second-order effects
- Istanbul's rising acquisition prices feed on themselves: within 18 months, Spyke — another Istanbul multiplayer studio — raises a $55M seed from Griffin Gaming Partners, the largest Turkish seed round ever, as investors price local teams against Zynga's exit multiples.
- Rival mobile publishers now face a build-versus-buy question on hyper-casual: matching a weekly release cadence organically is hard, pushing consolidation toward the few studios that already operate at that tempo.
Third-order effects
- The end of this arc is cautionary: Take-Two pays $12B for Zynga in 2022 right as casual gaming peaks post-pandemic, Apple's ATT breaks the cheap user-acquisition economics hyper-casual depends on, and the mobile market heads into a downturn (the full look-back) — meaning acquirers were paying peak-cycle prices for volume-driven models.
- If the pattern holds, hyper-casual consolidation concentrates hit-finding capability in a handful of publisher platforms, turning studio M&A — not individual titles — into the primary competitive weapon in mobile gaming.
The trend: Mobile gaming's hyper-casual boom drove publishers like Zynga to buy Istanbul studios at accelerating prices, until ATT and the post-pandemic downturn exposed how cyclical that volume-first model was.