Trends Podcast

A game where pigs ride a conveyor belt made its twenty-person studio worth more than a billion dollars. You tap to send a pig onto the belt and it rains balls onto pixel cubes of its own color. Five more pigs wait in line.

That game is called Pixel Flow.

On the nineteenth of February, Scopely, the company behind Monopoly GO, bought a majority stake in the studio that made it. The deal valued the studio at more than a billion dollars.

Loom Games is in Istanbul. Kübra Gündoğan runs it. She and her co-founder, Emre Çelik, spent years making casual games together at another studio before they opened Loom in July twenty twenty-five.

Before Pixel Flow, they built prototype after prototype and tested one mechanic after another. Gündoğan tried this one on paper first.

She told WIRED Türkiye, "Even when simulating Pixel Flow with paper and pen, I realized it could be very fun."

The game came out in August twenty twenty-five. It's free to play. It earns from ads between rounds and from in-app purchases that run from a dollar ninety-nine to thirty-four ninety-nine.

The founders had money from their last game and a choice: raise from investors or put it all into this one.

Gündoğan told her co-founder, "There's only one path forward. We're going all in."

By the end of the first month, the game was paying for itself. Çelik said they could start scaling it "without needing external resources."

In October the game took off and the studio had eight people. By January Pixel Flow was earning more than a million dollars a day from purchases and ads.

Within months it passed ten million players.

Pixel Flow became the only casual puzzle game made in Turkey to reach the top twenty highest-grossing games in the United States. In under a year, players spent about a hundred and five million dollars inside it, by AppMagic's estimate. It was the third puzzle game of its kind to pass a hundred million.

A hit like that gets copied.

Gündoğan said so herself: "We are aware that our game has been copied, but that doesn't intimidate us."

Both founders stayed on to run the studio after the deal. "This is not an exit story," Gündoğan said. "It's a new beginning." She plans for Pixel Flow to last at least ten years.

When I mapped AI game generators for the Trends dot V C report, each tool promised a game from one sentence. A prompt box now makes a prototype in minutes.

Pixel Flow shows what one good prototype can be worth.

A game first played with paper and pen was worth a billion dollars seven months after its studio opened. Visit trends dot V C and join more than fifty thousand founders to get the next opportunity.