Playtika's party at Casual Connect Tel Aviv.
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The DeanBeat: Two decades of work and $1B in sales put Israel’s game industry on the global map

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 7 min

TEL AVIV — Israel’s 200 game companies are expected to generate $1 billion in mobile and social gaming revenue in 2015, up 25 percent from $800 million a year earlier, according to a market analysis by Playtika, Israel’s largest game company and the biggest social casino game maker in the world.

That’s a great result for a young industry in a region that had no obvious reason to grow a game industry, and it explains why the Casual Connect game show was held in Israel for the first time last week in the place that calls itself the “Startup Nation.” The event drew more than 1,800 registered attendees, or twice as many as originally expected.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.