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June 12, 2012 06:58 pm GMT

Is The Next Big Game Company In The Middle East? Peak Hits 9.5M DAU, Revenue Up 600% Since Jan. 1

peak-games-logoOver the last several months, the biggest Western social gaming companies have been making moves, and attracting attention as a result. Japanese gaming giant GREE bought Funzio for $210 million to help it move into Western markets, and Zynga grabbed Draw Something creator OMGPOP for $183 million. Meanwhile, European social gaming companies, like Sweden’s King.com and Germany’s wooga have been steadily moving up the developer leaderboards. While the bigs all focus on Western markets, Istanbul-headquartered social gaming company Peak Games is busy taking a different tack, producing titles specifically for emerging markets, like the Middle East and North Africa. And it seems to be working. With just under 30 million monthly active users (MAUs) and 9.5 million daily active users (DAUs), Peak Games said today that it has become one of the three largest social gaming platforms in the world. The company’s chief strategy officer Rina Onur says that the company has been able to do this in just a year-and-a-half based on its laser focus on building social titles based on popular card and board games that are native to the region and are tailored to Turkish and Arabic (local) markets, in their native tongue. It’s a defensible strategy, Peak Games believes, as this approach to building games based on native, offline games (in the native language) can’t just be whipped up or ported in a few weeks. The startup has been quietly acquiring local development operatios, like hardcore strategy game studios Umaykut and Erlikhan (both of which are Turkish), as well as its recent purchase of Saudi Arabian social games giant Kammelna Games. At the time of its acquisition, Kammelna’s popular Arabic-language title Happy Farm had some 2.2 million daily active users. Again, these moves were made as part of the company’s effort to expand into markets underserved by gaming companies with localized, culturally-specific titles. Why? Well, for starters Onur says, young people in these regions are coming online en masse and they love games. There’s also the fact that Turkey and MENA have increasingly connected populations, and Turkey, for example, has the seventh largest Facebook markets, with over 30 million+ using the social network. What’s more, in February, Onur told us that more than two-thirds of Internet users in Saudi Arabia were playing games online and that “the country has one of the highest average revenue per user (ARPU) rates in social gaming.” Today, Peak Games seems

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