The ‘Why’ Behind Grand Games’ $30M Investment
We wrote about “Grand Games secures $30M Series A” last week.
Cooler stuff? Just published our “Magic Sort Analysis“, check it out!
Let’s talk about the How & Why.
Securing $30M just 9 months after its launch? 🦄
Folks, it’s something big.
The publisher behind Magic Sort made $4M+ in 6 months.
Among the largest Series A rounds for Turkish gaming startups.
Turkey’s Casual Mobile Gaming scene is booming. Or, it’s been booming 😅
Check out: Mobile Gaming World: Türkiye
- Dream Games raised $255 million in 2022.
- Peak Games was acquired by Zynga in 2020 for $1.8 billion.
- Spyke raised $50M last year and launched with $55 million.
- DoubleU Games Acquires Turkish Studio Paxie Games
- Azur Games, has acquired the hypercasual portfolio of Good Job Games.
- Agave Games’ $18M Series A at a valuation of around $100M last month.
- Cypher Games Secures 10M$ Investment to Accelerate Global Expansion.
- Tripledot Studios levels up with $116M round, now at $1.4 billion valuation.
The Start
Good Job Games is where the 3 founders of Grand Games got their start. Batuhan Çelebi, Mustafa Fırtına, and Mehmet Çalım were working together there when they came up with the idea.
A unique team-driven approach, contrasting with the founder-led decision-making.
‘The Grand Culture’ has become its “biggest separator” among gaming companies in Istanbul.
Inspired by Supercell, Grand Games emphasizes team autonomy and a culture of creativity, complemented by AI tools to streamline production.
THE GAME: Magic Sort
Magic Sort, developed by Grand Games, has garnered significant attention in Türkiye due to its impressive performance metrics and the substantial $30M Series A funding secured by the company.
Currently, the game’s user acquisition strategy primarily utilizes two channels: Facebook and AppLovin.
This approach mirrors a soft launch phase, similar to the strategy employed by Triple Match City in previous months.
Notably, the AppLovin setup is robust, featuring eight distinct playable ads, indicating a readiness for broader deployment. However, the absence of other major platforms such as Google, Mintegral, Moloco, and TikTok raises questions about the comprehensive UA scaling strategy.
Despite the limited channel utilization, Magic Sort reportedly boasts strong performance metrics, suggesting a promising trajectory. Given Türkiye’s dynamic gaming market, the game’s success is anticipated to continue. While my comments may have downplayed the importance of a marketing director’s background, the achievements of the founding team at Grand Games highlight the impact of strategic leadership in driving growth.
For a deeper insight into Magic Sort, you might find this review video informative.
“Magic Sort is an innovative sort puzzler, which tries to disrupt the whole Sort genre, driven mainly by Ad Revenue.
It applies the typical Royal match high production formula, together with some innovation regarding the core gameplay such as fail state monetization. Validated by the 30M$ raise.”
The sort puzzle sub-genre 🧩 is mainly dominated by Ad Revenue games, with not that high production quality. The tide is shifting and now that we have Hexasort by Lion Studios in the category, even though having its own unique version of sort core, more IAP-based games 💸 are coming to disrupt this sub-genre. Magic Sort has high production visuals, a more diverse level design, and a shift toward more aggressive monetization is one of them.
Most of the water sort puzzle games don’t tell you that you have lost if you brick your level by incorrect movement of the colors. Some have time-based levels ⏲️ like Colorwood, but Magic Sort keeps the calmness of no timers & no moves. If you have already lost your level, instead of you banging your head against a wall for the remaining time being frustrated compared to different games, they use this moment as their monetized fail state scenario. Immediately after you brick your level you get the +1 more bottle offer similar to Candy Crush 🍬 offering you +5 moves.
This works very well and it also puts the game into a more “premium” category as Ads start only from level 22. There is still a long feature set to be built 🏗️ with secondary progression and more live ops event structure similarly to Royal Match, but the game is already showing great promise. And don’t be surprised by that relatively “low daily revenue” as these games take time to monetize, but once they do, they are an unstoppable train.
Color Sort Genre?
In December, Magic Sort got #7 in Revenue although it’s pretty new in the race.
Will dive deep into the data below.
Data Lovers
1M$ & 240K in last-30. How about the total?
3M$+ out of 650K Installs.
Almost half of the total came from Last-30. It’s cooking! Can’t wait for the Jan & Feb data.
Downloads
Revenue
