The below article, written by Eyyüp Karagüllü, first appeared in WIRED Türkiye in Turkish. It has edited for translation, brevity and clarity.
On February 13, an article by Aylin Yazıcı on the popular gaming news site Deconstructor of Fun asked the question: “Why did this game blow up and why are people still talking about it?”
The subject was the mobile game Pixel Flow!
“The game isn’t just being opened frequently — it’s being actively played,” Yazıcı wrote. Pixel Flow!, she said, wasn’t the type of game you play with Netflix on in the background. Instead, it demanded focus, timing and deliberation from the player, an intriguing mix of difficulty that draws players in.
Similar news sites were asking the same question of Pixel Flow!, developed by the Istanbul-based game studio Loom Games. Many wondered how they did it.
It was a fair question.
After all, Loom Games, an independent game studio founded by Kübra Gündoğan and Emre Çelik and with only ten employees, was generating incredible revenue and acquiring players every day in a genre known as hybrid-casual.
Three months after debuting on app stores last August, Pixel Flow! surpassed half a million U.S. dollars in daily revenue. Then it crossed the million-dollar-a-day milestone just a few months later in December.
In the game’s first four months, it became the only casual game released in the last 12 months that managed to enter the top 20 highest-grossing mobile games in the U.S. It reached one million daily active users and was downloaded more than 10 million times.
That’s rare growth for games of this type. In fact, six days after Yazıcı’s article appeared in Deconstructor of Fun, it was announced that Loom Games could become Türkiye's seventh unicorn with Scopely — which previously broke the record for the biggest mobile launch in history with MONOPOLY GO! — agreeing to acquire a majority stake in the business.
The agreement was announced in February 2026. In other words, Loom Games had reached a potential billion-dollar valuation in just four months. That placed them third on the list of the world's fastest unicorn startups behind Avant and NuCom Group. In comparison, Türkiye's two gaming companies that previously reached unicorns, Peak Games and Dream Games achieved those titles in ten and three years, respectively.
“Even when simulating Pixel Flow! with paper and pen, I realized it could be very fun,” says Kübra Gündoğan, co-founder and CEO of Loom Games. “We plan for Pixel Flow! to have a lifespan of at least ten years.”
Candy Crush, another massive hit, released 14 years ago, is the game upon which the casual mobile gaming world fundamentally built itself. It has thousands of lookalikes and propelled studios that iterated on some of its features to billion-dollar valuations. Can Pixel Flow! do the same in the hybrid-casual genre? That’s the question being asked throughout the mobile gaming industry because it turns all known rules of hybrid-casual games upside down. Even defining the game’s genre itself is difficult: Some in the industry consider Pixel Flow! a puzzle game, some say it’s a color-matching game. Even others consider it a shooter.
In Pixel Flow!, players line up shooters to hit pixel blocks of the same color and clear the board piece by piece. Its core loop is based on placing shooters onto a constantly moving conveyor belt. Each shooter has a limited amount of ammunition; after firing at the pixel blocks of its own color, it either disappears if its ammunition runs out or returns to the waiting area to be reused. The capacity of this conveyor belt is limited. In other words, if players mismanage the sequencing and timing, they can run out of space or options.
This is what makes the game unique: the struggle of sequencing and managing an uninterrupted flow of color.
Those familiar with the gaming world may think this setup rejects the classic hybrid-casual game design.
Because instead of setting up a superficial core loop where a player can tap the screen with half of their attention while watching a movie, Pixel Flow! encourages the player to develop a strategy by calculating the pixels hidden inside the visual.
Gamona Lab, a Vietnam-based game intelligence and analysis platform, also points out that Pixel Flow! triggers a sense of self-competition in players. And they’re not wrong — players have to be both mentally agile and also combine that with excellent dexterity. In a way, this offers the player the excitement of competing with themselves in a way. The game, thought to be easy at first glance, gets progressively more difficult. It is a game where, as the player gains experience, they improve and start to employ better strategies. The result delivers a feeling of both continuous self-improvement and self-competition.
Reviews about mobile games often include phrases like “Shows too many ads, boring, good, buggy, unnecessary, great.” In Pixel Flow!, on the other hand, a large portion of players describe the feeling they experience.
One writes: “The first thing I noticed while playing the game was that clicking sound (of a pixel being popped), it has a very relaxing tone.” Another explains: “It makes you ambitious without putting too much stress on you. Even if you fail, you maintain your hope for the next attempt.” Another says they see it as a kind of meditation.
What gives this feeling to players is hidden in the words of e2vc Managing Partner Enis Hulli, who invested in Loom Games in November 2025, along with Akın Babayiğit, managing director of Arcadia Gaming Partners: “Pixel Flow! succeeded because while two mechanics are combined in games, Loom Games used three or even four mechanics at the same time.”
Building a successful venture was not easy for Gündoğan and Çelik. In the seven years that passed leading up to the title of “Türkiye's seventh unicorn” with Scopely’s majority stake acquisition, the team suffered 200 failed game attempts and 60 rejections from various venture capital funds.
Still, they maintained determination.
Gündoğan and Çelik were university students interested in gaming, unaware of each other until 2019.
Gündoğan, 29, was studying Computer Engineering at Beykent University where she started developing games. She says she made simple mobile games in the hyper-casual genre mostly for “entertainment purposes” with her group of friends at school, and as it gained demand and she learned the business, she decided to go deeper.
Çelik, a 30-year-old graduate of Gebze Technical University Computer Engineering, had focused on the technical side of the business with the dream of developing a game that everyone would play. He started coding during his high school years and had made many games, but there was no one among his friend group who shared his dream of starting a business.
Remembering the day they met upon a recommendation of a friend, Gündoğan smiles and says, “Deciding to set out wasn't very difficult actually. I said to Emre, 'I will enter the industry with hyper-casual games. I have ideas — be my co-founder and CTO, and I believe it will be successful. Can we do it together?'”
Emre Çelik says the answer to this question was very clear for him. “When Kübra explained her dream, I realized it was a field where university students like us could come together and make a hit game. Since there was no desire for entrepreneurship in the people around me, Kübra was exactly the person I was looking for. I accepted without thinking much. I'm glad Kübra found me, and I'm glad we set out together.”
Immediately, their first company, Crescive Games, was established and began operations in a technopark before moving to their own offices. The first three years were filled with failed game prototypes.
Their first game success came in early 2023, which was a hybrid-casual game called Twisted Tangle. The game was downloaded more than 10 million times worldwide in just two months (currently this figure is more than 30 million). but the team decided they wanted to own a game’s full experience as a developer and publisher.
Despite years of experience and a successful game, the probability of Gündoğan and Çelik launching another successful game seemed unlikely. Statistics show a studio can only catch a hit every five years.
“There is incredible competition in the game industry. Even if you do something very innovative, it can end in disappointment,” says Çelik.
With this in mind, Pixel Flow! began to take shape in the spring months of 2025. In July, they founded Loom Games to self-publish. By the end of August, they sent the prototype of the game to the App Store.
In just a few weeks, the game started to earn back the marketing dollars spent.
“By the end of a month, we were able to start scaling the game without needing external resources,” Çelik says.
Loom Games, however, was a bit unprepared for the growth that came. “When we got to this point with eight people, our lives were dragged into complete chaos, so to speak,” Çelik remembers. “We needed to look at the game day and night.”
Then, around the end of October, Loom Games received investment from e2vc and Akın Babayiğit, whom Gündoğan and Çelik address as “Ağabey” (an affectionate Turkish term for a trusted mentor or older brother).
They did not have to wait long for the Scopely investment.
A few months later, Scopely announced it had entered a definitive agreement to acquire a majority stake in the Istanbul-based development studio behind mobile game Pixel Flow! Scopely Chief Business Officer (CBO) Shlomi Aizenberg says that originality lies behind the reasons for the decision to invest in Loom Games.
“We are constantly exploring opportunities that could bring world-class teams and game franchises into our operating system,” Aizenberg says. “What stood out in the case of Pixel Flow! was the mix of creative originality, a willingness to iterate, immediate player traction and the potential to grow into an enduring experience with a highly engaged community. What sets the game apart is its innovative new game mechanic, something that has clearly resonated with players at scale.”
Indeed, Loom Games had developed an original mechanic in a period when the game industry was completely flooded with copycats.
“Today in the industry, producing a hit game is as difficult as finding a needle in a haystack,” Çelik says.
So what’s next?
Aizenberg says Scopely wants to ensure the Loom Games team maintains its creative leadership, and that Scopely will focus on offering global infrastructure, expertise and resources that will help them scale.
“We define this as the 'Scopely operating system' unique to us,” Aizenberg says. “The goal is to preserve what makes teams unique while amplifying their impact.”
Therefore, Gündoğan and Çelik now have more room to maneuver. Their plan is to continue developing the game, and they hope for Pixel Flow! to have a lifespan of at least 10 years.
“We want to do this forever,” Gündoğan says.
Additional comments shared with WIRED below:
WIRED: You often describe game development as more than just a business. How do you see it as a form of creative expression, and what does “play” mean to you in terms of its impact on people?
Shlomi Aizenberg: At its core, game development is one of the most dynamic forms of creative expression — it brings together storytelling, design, and technology into something people actively experience.
For us, “play” is fundamental. It’s often how we make our first friends, how we connect, learn, and recharge. Yet, in many ways, there isn’t enough play in our lives.
When we reconnect with that spirit of play, we tap into a part of ourselves that we want to be in touch with more often — as play is a form of connection that can exist simply for joy, curiosity and satisfaction, through experiences that are deeply meaningful.
That’s the magic of play. It brings people together across cultures and backgrounds, creating moments of happiness and meaning without agenda beyond the experience itself.
Play is one of the purest forms of human connection, and that’s why we believe that life is better when we play together.
At scale, play becomes a powerful force for building community, a sense of belonging and shared experiences across cultures and geographies.
More broadly, Scopely believes games can be a force for good, creating meaningful connections, vibrant communities, and making life better through play — so the ambition is for games like Pixel Flow! to become a meaningful part of people’s lives.