AI coding assistants like Claude Code are allowing a single developer to do the work of an entire studio, collapsing team sizes across Turkey's once-booming game industry. In Istanbul, solo creators are shipping mobile games in two months with no programmers, no artists, and no writers. The shift is creating a new class of micro-studio founders while wiping out entry-level jobs that once served as the industry's ladder.
From 12 Employees to Two
Emirhan Gül, a 24-year-old developer in Istanbul, founded his own studio after burning out at a startup that demanded a new game design every week. When he launched, he was the only coder on the team. After Claude Code arrived in early 2025, he cut his headcount from nearly a dozen to just two full-time staff. The $200 annual subscription, he says, replaced the output of multiple junior developers.
"With Claude Code, I can do all that easily. It really sped things up and helped me a lot."
Gül is not an outlier. Ender Tınkır, who previously worked on hit titles like Toon Blast at Peak and Royal Match at Dream Games, left his studio job in 2022 to go solo. Using Microsoft Copilot, OpenAI's Codex, and Claude Cowork, his one-person Play On Studios released its first mobile game earlier this year. An investor approached him in June to back an "AI-powered mobile game company" that runs on a team of two.
"Two years ago, I couldn't have imagined that I could make a game by myself. In just two months, I developed a game without any involvement in coding, design, or product decisions."
The Boom That Became a Bust for Juniors
Turkey was Europe's second-largest game development hub after London, with over 800 active studios at its peak. In 2021, more than half of Apple's top 10 mobile games were Turkish. Then the numbers cratered. New gaming startups fell from nearly 200 in 2021 to 84 in 2023, and the decline has continued. Jobs for junior programmers, concept artists, and narrative writers have dried up as studios replace them with AI subscriptions.
Nazım Adaklı, who lectures on AI in games at Bahçeşehir University in Istanbul, sees the pattern everywhere he looks.
"Instead of hiring five junior programmers at the startup where he works, my developer friend does all the work himself with AI."
Güven Çatak, founder of the university's Game Lab, says the traditional career path has collapsed for his students.
"Junior positions have tanked. The earlier path of 'I'll get in a big studio, gain experience, and then move up to a senior position' has become a thing of the past."
Adaklı is now telling students to skip the job hunt entirely. "Waiting to be hired by big studios is a mistake," he says. "Right now is the worst time to enter the game industry to find a stable job, but it's the best time to start your own venture."
A Flood of Solo Developers, Few Profits
The barrier to releasing a game has never been lower. Steam's first Turkey event in 2023 drew a modest number of small studios with two or three employees. A year later, that figure had surged significantly. But the market is not growing with them. Only one in five gaming titles turns a profit, and AI has made cloning existing hits trivially easy.
Begüm Ceren Onar, a 34-year-old game designer, learned this the hard way. She was laid off in December after her studio's long-running project flopped. The company pivoted to AI-generated ideas and cut 17 of its 20 employees.
"More people are developing games on their own, but most are not making a living off of it. Quantity doesn't always mean quality."
The Global Squeeze
The trend extends far beyond Turkey. The global video game market is worth over $500 billion, with mobile gaming accounting for half. Yet even the giants are shrinking. Microsoft Xbox is cutting roughly a fifth of its workforce and divesting five development studios. Thousands of industry workers have been laid off worldwide in the past two years as AI adoption accelerates.
This mirrors what happened in other creative industries when generative AI arrived. Stock photography, illustration, and copywriting all saw a similar pattern: a brief golden age for freelancers with AI skills, followed by a race to the bottom as the tools became cheap and universal. Game development may be next. The difference is that a video game is a far more complex product than a blog post or a logo. Whether a flood of AI-assisted titles will raise the floor of indie gaming or simply drown the market in low-quality clones remains the open question.
Watch for Steam's next regional data drop. If solo developer submissions keep climbing while average revenue per title falls, the Turkish industry will serve as the early warning for a global restructuring.