Why Türkiye's games investors care about mobile UA data

Türkiye has become the place to watch in mobile gaming investment. InvestGame tracked $335 million of private mobile gaming funding in the country across 35 rounds and 29 companies over 2025 and early 2026. That's 45.6% of the $735 million raised worldwide in the period, and seven of the ten largest global rounds came from Türkiye.

The money is big, concentrated, and a lot of it is for user acquisition. That changes what investors need to see, and how closely they follow the numbers.

Basak and Görkem discuss how an investor evaluates a games startup, and how Laton works hands-on with its portfolio studios on growth and user acquisition.

The headline deal is Grand Games’ $70 million Series B, led by Balderton Capital. InvestGame reports that the proceeds go primarily toward marketing to scale existing titles. AppMagic’s 2026 Türkiye report counts an average of 24 funding rounds a year across Turkish gaming, and notes that full acquisitions are more common than partnerships.

Most of the activity sits in puzzle. AppMagic puts puzzle at 97% of Turkish gaming revenue, and PocketGamer.biz reports that much of the success is in puzzle and hybrid-casual, built by founders who came up through studios like Peak, Gram and Dream.

Investors in this market say the team comes first. Görkem Türk, Founding Partner at Laton Ventures, points out that the number of companies raising is high compared with the number actually releasing games, and that for some companies the most successful product right now is the pitch deck. In the current games market, he says, the focus has to be on the team. Once the right people are together, the chance of a good game rises significantly, and that is the part Laton looks at most.

Other investors describe the same pattern. At the Mobidictum Conference in Istanbul, Arcadia Gaming Partners' Akin Babayigit named Türkiye as one of a handful of hubs worth backing, crediting work ethic as well as marketing know-how, level design and monetisation skills. Türk's advice at that event was to double down on strengths rather than romanticise diversification.

A team-first view does not mean hands-off. Laton's model is to guide founders as they hire and to get involved in operations directly. Türk describes the fund as closer to a game company than a VC, with most of the working day spent in Adjust, AppLovin and other user acquisition channels. Laton manages growth and user acquisition for its portfolio companies itself.

That is a meaningful signal about what the market now expects. When an investor runs UA alongside the studio, the numbers stop being a quarterly report and become a daily working tool. Both sides need to be reading the same data.

For a studio raising money, that raises the bar on measurement. Three things come up repeatedly in how Turkish teams and their backers talk about early performance.

The first is cohort size. AppQuantum’s head of marketing analytics wrote in PocketGamer.biz that a cohort needs at least 300 installs or 10 paying users before a forecast is reliable. The second is early ROAS. The same article describes projecting annual ROAS from day-7 performance, with a typical margin of error of 5 to 10% at the project and platform level. The third is reconciliation. Spend reported by the measurement partner has to match the spend reported by each ad platform, or the forecast will lack a strong foundation.

A studio that can show clean cohorts, early ROAS and reconciled spend is easier to back than one with a polished deck and loose numbers. It also gives the investor what Türk’s approach depends on: a shared view of what the game is doing, week by week.

Adjust gives both sides of that conversation one source of truth. Adjust Measure attributes installs and in-app events across networks. ROI measurement ties spend to revenue so ROAS comes from a single place. Fraud prevention removes installs that would distort the cohorts a funding decision rests on, and Adjust Analyze lets teams cut those cohorts by source, country and campaign across a whole portfolio.

Adjust's Mobile app trends spotlight edition: Türkiye 2026 benchmarks installs, sessions and retention across gaming, finance and e-commerce in the country. To talk with our team about measurement for your studio or portfolio, get in touch.