Turkey has gained a well-earned reputation as a veritable cauldron of mobile games startups, leading to the rise of VCs dedicated to the sector.
The latest to join this coterie is Laton Ventures, a new gaming-focused VC that has raised a $35 million fund.
Indeed, between 2018 and 2022 Turkish gaming start-ups raised more than $1 billion in funding.
There are now at least 25 VC funds that invest in video games startups based out of Turkey.
“We’re positioning as a bridge between the Turkish gaming ecosystem, which is booming, and the international gaming ecosystem.
LinkedIn, the Microsoft-owned social platform, has made a name for itself primarily as a platform for people looking to network and pick up knowledge for professional purposes, and for recruitment — a business that now has more than 900 million users.
Now, to boost the time people are spending on the platform, the company is breaking into a totally new area: gaming.
App researchers have started to find code that points to the work LinkedIn is doing.
The LinkedIn spokesperson declined to say how and if Microsoft is involved in the gaming project at LinkedIn.
Facebook, the world’s biggest social network, has been a major driver of social gaming over the years.
Former web3 gaming founders raise $2.5M for their NFT marketplace to retain users even when there ‘isn’t money to be made’Even though NFT sales volume is still down 88% from 2022 all time-highs (and down 38% year-to-date), Pallet Exchange is building a new type of NFT marketplace focused on user retention.
“It’s cool if there’s a lot of financial innovations happening, but at the same time we saw there’s pain points from a user experience,” Li said.
It’s using social media tactics like in-app messaging that lets people interested in the same NFT collections engage with each other on its marketplace.
That’s when Seiyans, an Sei-based NFT collection fueled by meme culture, capitulated the new blockchain and marketplace into the talk of the crypto world.
Down the line, Pallet plans to look into working with big partners in the art marketplace and create a separate marketplace for those creators.
NFT fantasy sports startup Sorare lays off 13% of staff, as web3 gaming continues to sputter Sorare is not completely shuttering its New York office but is shifting more employees to ParisWeb3-enabled fantasy sports platform Sorare laid off 22 employees based in its New York office in February.
The company will backfill most of these laid-off roles in Paris, according to Julia, with plans to hire more than 20 roles in the next six months.
Sorare is not shutting down its New York office.
Sorare saw $200 million in user transaction volume in 2023, a source familiar with the situation said.
Web3 gaming startup Mythical Games raised nearly $300 million in venture money before holding three rounds of layoffs.
Notably, the experience is free for Sling TV and Sling Freestream customers, and they can play games while simultaneously watching live TV content — providing entertainment during commercial breaks.
Sling TV also allows users to expand the Arcade row on the home screen to have a more immersive playing experience.
Sling TV says that 10 games will be available at launch, with new titles to be added regularly.
Sling didn’t say if it would partner with other gaming companies to expand its gaming library, but we wouldn’t be surprised if it did.
Dish, which recently merged with EchoStar, reported a loss of 65,000 Sling TV subscribers in the fourth quarter of 2023, bringing the total to 2.06 million.
Frost Giant, a venture-backed startup building a real-time strategy (RTS) game called Stormgate, is turning to its community to top up its coffers ahead of the game’s launch this year.
The venture capital market for gaming companies has retreated sharply since Frost Giant last raised money (a $25 million Series A back in 2022).
Thus far, Frost Giant has picked up $611,421 in reservations for its community fundraise on its Start Engine page.
Reg CF offerings are limited to $5 million, so Frost Giant has a hard cap on how much it can raise.
We got a similar peek into Substack’s financials when it raised capital from its community last year, and we’ll get a similar influx of data from Frost Giant.
Honor of Kings, Tencent’s massively popular mobile game, has its eye set on the international market in 2024.
In part thanks to its success with loot boxes, Honor of Kings has been an enormous financial success for Tencent.
It was the world’s second-highest-grossing mobile game in December, trailing only after Monopoly Go!, according to market research firm Sensor Tower.
As of February 6, Honor of Kings had amassed over 2 million pre-registrations across MENA, Eastern Europe and South Asia.
With its flourishing gaming population, the MENA region will be an important test for Honor of Kings’ second try at global expansion.
Three months after completing its $68.7 billion acquisition of gaming company Activision Blizzard, Microsoft is laying off 1,900 employees in its gaming divisions.
This amounts to about 8.6% of 22,000 Microsoft employees in gaming.
Blizzard president Mike Ybarra also announced he will step down, now that the acquisition is finalized.
According to game developer and consultant Rami Ismail, about 5,600 gaming employees have been laid off so far in 2024.
Thats more than half of all gaming layoffs from 2023.
Beijing has quietly pulled the proposed curbs on the video game industry from the official website, weeks after the draft guidelines wiped tens of billions of dollars off the market value of local titans.
The link to the draft rules was no longer accessible as of this morning, as first reported by Reuters.
The move follows Beijing also removing a key official – the head of the publication bureau of Communist Party’s Propaganda Department – over the handling of the release of the draft rules, which caught investors and gaming giants by surprise.
Local media reported in recent weeks — after the wipeout — that authorities may be open to walking back on some of the proposed rules.
Last month, China’s video game regulator proposed new measures to curb excessive time and money spent on computer and smartphone games.
Google announced today that the company plans to support more real-money games (RMG) on the Play Store this year by allowing more types of games in the category following local laws.
Google started working on including real money gaming apps on the Play Store in 2021.
Last year, it started a pilot in India to allow fantasy sports and Rummy apps on the local Play Store.
In 2020, Google pulled Paytm’s app from the Play Store because the app included newly introduced fantasy sports elements.
After that developers will be able to publish their real-money gaming apps on the Play Store beyond fantasy sports categories.
