- Scopely is expanding into Türkiye and hybridcasual with the acquisition of Loom Games.
- A performance-based deal structure values Loom Games in excess of $1 billion.
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Tanja Loktionova is the founder of Values Value, co-founder of InGame Job and a board member of multiple game studios.
On February 19th, 2026, Scopely announced the acquisition of a majority stake in Loom Games, an Istanbul-based mobile studio, at a valuation exceeding $1 billion. The studio behind Pixel Flow! had attracted over 10 million players in its first few months on the market. The team size: roughly 20 people.
Let that sit for a moment.
20 people. One billion dollars. In less than a year.
I’ve been tracking employment trends in this industry since 2017, when I started what became the Big Games Industry Employment Survey. In those nine years, I’ve watched the industry cycle through every extreme.
The growth-at-all-costs era, when headcount was a proxy for ambition and studios hired aggressively to signal scale to investors. The acquihire boom, when talent was acquired wholesale as a shortcut to capability. The over-hiring wave of 2020–2021, when studios expanded faster than any pipeline could sustain.
And then the correction – brutal, prolonged and still ongoing – that left tens of thousands of people without jobs at studios that had been profitable the year before.
Loom Games is not a reaction to any of that. It’s something different. It’s what comes next.
This isn’t just a fresh games story
To understand why Loom Games matters for hiring strategy, it helps to look outside our industry for a moment. Lovable, a Swedish AI app-building startup, hit $100m in annual recurring revenue in eight months. The team at the time: 45 people. That’s over $2.2m in revenue per employee, a ratio that would have been considered science fiction in any previous era of software development.
Two companies. Two different industries. Both with tiny, elite teams generating unicorn-level outcomes. Both operating from outside Silicon Valley – one from Istanbul, one from Stockholm. Both growing faster than the traditional model said was possible.
This pattern has a precedent inside the games industry itself. When Clash of Clans became the most profitable mobile game in the world in 2013, Supercell had fewer than 200 people.
The press asked Ilkka Paananen whether he’d scale the team to match the success. He said no, because he believed the lean cell model was the source of the success, not a constraint on it. The industry spent the better part of a decade treating this as inspiration.
Creation and operation are not the same problem
What Supercell themselves did in 2023 is instructive. Faced with the challenge of managing both new game development and large-scale live operations, the company formally split into two divisions: New Games and Live Games, each with different structures. New game development remained small, flat and lean. Live operations adopted more traditional hierarchy and management.
Supercell didn’t abandon the model. They codified the distinction between creating and operating.
That distinction matters for how we interpret Loom Games. Pixel Flow! is a creation-and-launch story: 20 people, one product, an extraordinary outcome. What happens if it evolves into a long-running live service is a different operational question, and a fair one. Lean teams are most powerful at the moment of creation. That’s precisely where Loom Games made its case, and where the signal is strongest.
CEO Kübra Gündoğan says: “This isn’t about exiting early, it’s about setting up Pixel Flow for long-term growth and impact, and starting the next chapter of what we hope to achieve as a team. This is not an exit story, it’s a new beginning.”
The pattern is not a coincidence. It points to something structural.
Headcount was never the point
For most of the games industry’s history, scale and team size were effectively synonymous. More ambition meant more people. More people meant more complexity. More complexity meant more management. The org chart grew in one direction: outward.
What Loom Games demonstrated – and what I’ve increasingly observed over the past two years in conversations with founders and in the employment patterns surfaced by our research – is that the best outcomes no longer reliably come from the biggest teams.
They come from the densest ones. A small group of high-agency, versatile people who move fast, iterate relentlessly and don’t spend half their time in alignment meetings.
This isn’t a romantic notion about scrappy underdogs. It’s arithmetic. When a 20-person studio reaches a $1bn valuation, the implied value per employee is $50m. No traditional hiring model is built around that number because until recently, that number didn’t exist.
Pixel Flow! is a hybridcasual mobile puzzle game, and that context matters. The 20-person model isn’t a formula that scales to every genre or platform. But the principle underneath it does.
The question Loom Games poses to the rest of the industry isn’t about team size. It’s about talent density, and whether every seat in your studio is filled by someone genuinely irreplaceable.
What this means for how studios hire right now
The practical implications are uncomfortable but important. If you are a studio founder today, the Loom Games story raises questions you should be asking yourself honestly:
- Is every person on your team genuinely irreplaceable, or are some seats filled out of habit, inertia or a belief that more people signals more seriousness?
- Are you hiring to execute a vision, or hiring because it feels like growth?
- And critically: are your best people exceptional because of their range, or just because everyone around them is slower?
These are not comfortable questions for an industry that has spent years equating team size with ambition. But the evidence now suggests the opposite may be true. Raising the bar high enough that the team stays small by necessity may now be the most ambitious decision a founder can make.
The layoffs wave reframed
The games industry has been through a brutal period. Since 2022, tens of thousands of professionals have been laid off – including many from studios that were profitable at the time. I’ve spoken to hundreds of them. The human cost has been real and significant, and it hasn’t been evenly distributed. Senior talent displaced. Junior pipelines frozen. Entire disciplines restructured overnight.
But I think we’ve been misreading what’s driving it. The dominant narrative has been that studios over-hired during the pandemic boom and are now correcting. That’s partially true. What’s also true is that something more structural is happening – and a roughly 20-person team reaching a billion-dollar valuation makes it harder to dismiss.
Many layoffs are not simply a correction of past excess. They may represent the beginning of a permanent recalibration.
Survivorship bias is a legitimate objection, and worth addressing directly. Loom Games is the most striking recent example of something observable across industries, but striking examples are not the same as proof.
For every studio of 20 people that reaches a billion-dollar valuation, many more build something genuinely good and never find that outcome. Talent density improves the conditions for success. It does not guarantee it. The people displaced in the last four years were not let go because they lacked capability – they were caught in the consequences of decisions made above them, in conditions that no longer exist.
The over-hiring boom has passed. But AI adoption hasn’t, and for many of those affected, it was already reshaping the roles beneath them before anyone said it out loud.
What has changed is not the value of good people. What has changed is the pressure on founders to be deliberate about how many they need, and what kind.
Three things founders should do differently
First, treat your next hire as a board decision, not an operational one. If the Loom model holds – and the evidence suggests it does – then every seat on a lean team carries enormous weight. The cost of a wrong hire isn’t just a salary. It’s the dilution of a culture that depends on everyone operating above a very high minimum threshold.
Second, stop defining talent by role and start defining it by leverage. The question isn’t ‘Do we need a producer?’ but ‘Does this person, in this role, unlock disproportionate output from the people around them?’.
Generalists who can float across problems, move fast, and own outcomes end-to-end are worth more to a lean studio than specialists who go deep in one lane.
Third, make leanness a strategic signal, not an apology. The most sophisticated investors and acquirers, as Scopely’s move on Loom demonstrates, are increasingly drawn to studios that generate outsized output with minimal overhead. Your team size is not just an operational fact. It is a statement about your judgment as a founder.
The question the industry needs to sit with
Later this year, I’ll publish the next edition of the survey I started nine years ago. The questions I’m asking this time are sharper because the moment demands it. I believe the studios that navigate industry shifts best aren’t the ones that react fastest. They’re the ones that understand earliest what’s actually changing and why.
Loom Games didn’t just build a great game. They built an existence proof.
20 people. One product. One billion dollars.
And somewhere in Istanbul, Kübra Gündoğan and Emre Çelik likely knew exactly who deserved a seat at that table, and why.
The rest of us should be asking the same question about our own.
