Zynga recently acquired Turkey’s Rollic for $168 million, and now Rollic is turning around and buying the matching game Onnect from Chef Game Studio for $6 million.
It’s another sign that big game publishers can’t get enough of small game companies, particularly those based in Turkey. Zynga bought Istanbul-based Rollic, a maker of hypercasual mobile games (those that last a minute or so) in October.
Onnect has been acquired in full for a closing payment of $6 million and a potential future payment of $1 million, based on terms and conditions agreed upon by the parties. Rollic was founded in December 2018 by Burak Vardal, Deniz Basaran, and Mehmet Can Yavuz. Chef Game Studio is based in Ankara, Turkey.
As we mentioned yesterday in a story about Turkey’s Bigger Games raising money, the Game Developers Association of Turkey reports the country has more than 100 development studios of all sizes, estimated to have reached $1.5 billion in revenue in 2019. According to mobile data and analytics platform App Annie, as of July 30, four Turkish-made games were among the top 10 downloaded free games in the U.S. Apple Store.
Onnect is a connection-based pair-matching game with challenging levels. In the game, players must find matching tiles and connect pairs of up to three lines to remove all tile pairs before their time runs out. Onnect was developed by Chef Game Studio and published and partially owned by Rollic. The game will be further developed in-house at Rollic going forward and comprises part of Rollic’s game portfolio, which includes eight titles that have reached the No. 1 or No. 2 top free downloaded games positions in the U.S. App Store.