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Emerging markets social publisher Peak Games raises $11.5 million, looks to increase releases, move into mobile

Further studio and user acquisition on the cards

Emerging markets social publisher Peak Games raises $11.5 million, looks to increase releases, move into mobile
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Fast-growing social and mobile publisher Peak Games has announced its second funding round has raised $11.5 million.

Companies involved included Earlybird Venture Capital and Hummingbird Ventures and another strategic investor.

Peak raised $5 million in its Series A round in May 2011 from Earlybird, and $2.5 million in its seed round from Hummingbird and a group of angels in 2010.

The money will be used for market expansion, studio acquisition, staff hiring, and user acquisition.

Peak currently has over 4 million daily and 16 million monthly active users on Facebook, up 60 percent since May. According to AppData, it's ranked the sixth largest company on the platform.

Know your audience

Based in Turkey, Peak focuses on supplying emerging markets with localised, and culturally-relevant content.

Its biggest markets include Turkey, Mexico, Brazil and the Middle East and North African region (MENA); a total audience of over 200 million Facebook users, and one that's growing at a double digit rate.

Much of its initial growth came from games based on traditional Turkish and Arabic card and board games such as Okey, but since it's expanded with games for women and girls such as TrendKiz and a localised version of Happy Farm.

It recently acquired two Turkish hardcore strategy game studios Umaykut and Erlikhan, as well as signing partnership deals with RockYou (Zoo World 2), The Broth (Barn Buddy), and MagnetJoy (Pet Party) to create and publish localised versions of those games.

Cross-platform goal

"Understanding emerging markets like Turkey, MENA and Latin America is in our DNA," said CEO and co-founder Sidar Sahin.

"Our development studios are focusing on creating the best games on the market and we're making sure that they're culturally relevant. Now with the acquisition of Umaykut, we're very excited for our next-generation core games."

As part of the investment, the company is also looking to bring its social games to mobile platforms, both natively and via HTML5. CEO Sahin previously set up and sold Turkish mobile game publisher Funpac to Mynet in 2005.

Peak Games has offices and studios in Istanbul, Ankara, Amman, Barcelona, Berlin and San Francisco.

Jon Jordan
Jon Jordan
A Pocket Gamer co-founder, Jon can turn his hand to anything except hand turning. He is editor-at-large at PG.biz which means he can arrive anywhere in the world, acting like a slightly confused uncle looking for the way out. He likes letters, cameras, imaginary numbers and legumes.