Success Story of Gram Games
Time: 2012,
Base: A small 50 Square Meter office, somewhere in Istanbul, Turkey.
Five young developers started a game studio in 2012. Since then, they have struggled a lot. They failed to gain success in their first three games. But their faith turned around, while they concentrate on Puzzle Game. Yes, I am talking about “Gram Games”, now, the number one game studio in Turkey and have forty members in their team.
CEO of Gram Games, Mehmet Ecevit, and his four mates including his co-founders Kaan Karamanci and Alpay Koralturk got their first investment in January 2013. Within three months they have released their very first game “Robi: Cosmic Savior”. But they failed and same fate continued with their next two games namely “Railroad Gangs” and “Gran Tower”.
Ecevit is a self-taught programmer, and it began from his boarding school’s computer lab. To manage his education expenses, he used to shepherd with his grandmother. He goes through many difficulties in his early stage of life. And the same story rewind with Gram as well.
How Gram Games became so successful?
In spite of facing many ups and downs, they never lost hopes and decided to put the remaining $15K of the fund into one more game and launched their first puzzle game “1010!” in 2014 which was a big hit.
Then they again came out with “1010! World“, the sequel of 1010! adding more characters, themes, and levels in the middle of 2015.
Gram Games launched “Merged!” in January 2016, and the game became number 1 on the App Store and got over 1M download within a week. In August, they scored the same with “Six!” (Gram’s latest featured puzzle game) with almost two million downloads in the first week. It seems hard work and dedication is paying off for Grams. They are now growing stronger in both Android and iOS platforms.
Before this success, at the end of 2015, Gram launched “Lumino“, a puzzle game designed exclusively for Apple TV with a colorful and attractive design that looks great on a big screen.
Gram moved to a larger office, has over 1000 square meter of space in May 2015. Their strong belief in making an organization with genuine talent and comfortable workshop never involved them with hierarchies or managerial structures or any other corporate things. Nowadays, with over 40 million installers and 3.5 million active users, their games are downloaded more than 75 million times, and the count is still clicking. Their new mid-core game development studio launches in London, UK and expects that there will be 40 to 50 employees within 6 to 12 months.
As Gram’s origin is as an indie game dev, a great team of Gram with founder Mehmet Ecevit, organizer Sedef Ecevit, and four consultants Remzi Senel, Cem Civelek, Sahin Yalabik and Kerem Alemdar provide help to the new indie devs. They named the project “2Tons Acceleration Program” where newcomers get help with technical problems as well as marketing or promoting games without expectations of any financial vow. Their 1st 2Tons games launched in March 2015.
Their only passion is to have fun and convert it into the first class enjoyment for the mobile gamer of all over the world and committed to delivering high-quality social games that create real bonds through play. Surely they will again come out with great game ideas and incredible creativity in future.
Originally published at gameover.studio on September 21, 2016.
