The highlight of Istanbul’s Mobidictum Conference last week was Akın Babayiğit’s fireside chat with E2VC general partner Enis Hulli.
Babayiğit is the former Facebook exec, Tripledot cofounder and current Arcadia VC boss described by Bloomberg as Turkish mobile gaming’s ‘kingpin’. And for good reason.
As he explained to Hulli during the session, Babayiğit has been an integral part of Türkiye’s rise to prominence. He started out working with Sidar Sahin to scale up Peak Games, which was later acquired by Zynga for $1.8bn. After a long stint at Facebook, Babayiğit worked at Activision Blizzard King for a year – a spell he described as “a waste of time”.
He then founded Tripledot alongside Lior Shiff and Eyal Chameides in 2017, while also helping to build Luna Labs before selling it to IronSource.
Not content with all that, Babayiğit was also investing in Turkish studios like Dream Games, Good Job Games and Spyke during that time. He now runs Arcadia Gaming Partners, a $100m VC fund looking for the next big mobile game hit.
He summed up his investing strategy at the Mobidictum chat, entitled the billion-dollar blueprint, pretty simply: “I just invest when there’s a good team and good numbers”.
Thankfully he did elaborate some more, particularly on where he sees growth. And it’s certainly not in the west: Babayiğit agreed wholeheartedly when E2VC general partner Enis Hulli suggested that western game developers should be frightened by the rise of the Chinese mobile game ecosystem.
He added that studios like Hungry, Microfun, Century and Learnings are “10 times more competitive” than their contemporaries in the west – and that studios in Europe and North America are “kind of screwed”.
It’s only studios in places like China, Türkiye and Vietnam that really understand what’s effective in mobile today, he explained. “You have something that works, you know why it works, and then you try to differentiate tangentially, and that just takes brute force…the amount of hours put in equals more probability of success. And there’s three countries that put in enough hours, China, Türkiye, Vietnam. That’s it.”
“I feel like we have a lot to learn from China, actually,” he continued later. “Chinese guys come to Turkey and they learn from us, but actually we should learn from them, because they’re the ones innovating.”
Babayiğit also stated his belief that mobile game firms must choose between being either “product first” or “marketing first” in order to succeed. “You cannot be both…you cannot be halfway product, halfway marketing, and by the way, neither is better than the other.”
“For example, Dream Games is a product company…the philosophy is, ‘if I build the best product in the world, I will figure out marketing’…Tripledot was not that. Tripledot was a marketing company.”
He also claimed that a lot of VCs are looking at investing the wrong way. “I think VCs are very bad in judging the lag times between cause and effect,” he said. “Everybody in Türkiye is doing hybridcasual, so there’s a clear bias towards hybridcasual companies. But if you take a step back, the most misunderstood thing about mobile gaming is tail value.”
“You know the match 3 genre is way more competitive, way more capital intensive, but you do know that it has long tail value…right now, I invest in both match 3 and hybridcasual, but sometimes I worry for the hybrid casual guys…is there really longevity there?”
The session ended on a positive note, though. Babayiğit said after a recent drop off in mobile game funding overall, his VC firm Arcadia would be announcing some big investments soon, and buyers like Scopely, Tencent, Miniclip, Supercell and Tripledot “are all active”.
