Izmir, Ankara, Istanbul: A Month in Turkey’s Gaming Ecosystem

Lakshya (our Founder & CEO) and Satdeep (our VP of Revenue Ops) went to Turkey for the Mobidictum conference on April 10. It was decided they are gonna spend till the end of April Month in Turkey. And they came back with a lot, including being super tired and drained, missing their families, food, and home – all of which is a good thing. Trust me!

Our social media is full of posts about the trip. How happy we were on the center stage. How proud we were that people recognized UndrAds from when the team was last there in October 2025. But the highlights skip past how tough the journey was from the start.

The flight from Delhi to Izmir was supposed to be 7 hours. With layovers and delays, it took 21. No sleep. But still super excited.

Here is the rest of the story.

Mobidictum Games & Apps Summit 2026

By the time the team landed in Izmir, Mobidictum was less than a day away.

So, it was quite simple, put the bags down, rest up as much as they could, and then straight to the venue. Thinking coffee’s gonna take care of the rest.

Lakshya was on the panel that afternoon alongside Doruk Kaşoğlu, founder of Peax, and Murat Ödemiş, founder of Univenn. The topic was subscriptions, AI, and where monetization is actually heading.

Here’s the short version of what Lakshya said on stage: a business doesn’t survive with one customer, one channel, or one person. Monetization shouldn’t either. For years, studios picked a lane. Ads. IAP. Subscriptions. The lane was the strategy. That’s over. The studios growing right now are running blended models, balancing across markets and margins, treating monetization like a portfolio instead of a single bet.

You can read more about the session here.

Honestly, it was great in many ways. Though it was a one day conference, being on stage gave UndrAds and team that ego boost that we needed to manage what was coming our way in the next few days.

People already knew UndrAds.

Lakshya has a weekly posting streak on LinkedIn. He shares whatever he feels, learns, and wants to reflect on through these posts. Some of them resonated with people the team met in Turkey.

Same goes for Satdeep. Over his years in adtech, he’s attended plenty of global events. People recognized him from those rooms.

Trust me, this is rare. We are not going to pretend it didn’t feel good, because it felt great. But more than the good feeling, it changed the confidence we carried for every meeting after that point.

TMUG Club and Izmir

After Mobidictum, the team headed to Ankara. The big stop here was TMUG Club, the Türkiye Mobile Application Developers and Publishers Association, where the conversations happened away from the summit setting.

UDO Games, Moralabs, Dalak Games, Hypermonk Games. And that’s just Ankara.

Ankara was packed with meetings.

Satdeep had a great time talking about UndrAds and his passion for all things AI. He especially loved discussing autonomous AI (anyone from UndrAds can vouch for this), and his ideas resonated with the gaming studios in the room.

The studios we met were honest, upfront about their issues, and growing at the speed that none of us have seen. The people are so hard working and passionate, the team loved that.

Istanbul, and a coffee with Mohammed Dayoub

Istanbul was the last stop. By the time the team got there, they had already been on the move for weeks.

One of the interesting meetings in Istanbul was with Mohammed Dayoub of AdOnverse. The conversation was about the future of digital advertising and where the two teams might collaborate. Mohammed posted about it later, which is partly how this trip ended up turning into a public moment too.

#9 things we came home with

Lakshya wrote some of this up the Friday after the trip wrapped. Here is a paraphrased version:

1. On ads. Users don’t mind ads. They mind bad ad experiences. Cleaner, more efficient placements that don’t hurt gameplay get a different response entirely.
2. On user acquisition. Nothing is set-and-forget anymore. UA managers are running nonstop experiments across channels, creatives, and cohorts.
3. On revenue. Studio founders aren’t chasing moonshot spikes. They want stable ad revenue.
4. On metrics. ARPDAU is the north star. Everything ties back to it.
5. On AI. Founders are actively embedding AI into their pipelines, from creatives to monetization.
6. On subscriptions. Hybrid monetization is gaining real traction. It’s not just an alternate stream anymore.
7. On in-app ads. Smarter placements drive better engagement, not annoyance. Users actually welcome them.
8. On ad operations. Teams are tired of manual ops. They’re hunting for automation, not more dashboards.
9. On scaling ad revenue. Everyone wants monetization that scales without ten extra people behind it. The magic, again, is autonomous ad ops.

Touchdown in Delhi

And then they were home. Tired and drained.

But we learned Turkey’s app ecosystem is simple: consistency. Teams here show up every day. They solve real problems. They keep pushing even when things break.

This trip helped reinforce something Lakshya has been saying for months: autonomous is the new KPI. Not a feature. Not a buzzword.

Closing the month feeling grateful for the insights, the openness, and the people who turned conversations into friendships.