Reykjavik, Iceland · Startup CCP Games is the Reykjavik studio behind EVE Online, the long-running sandbox space MMO that has become one of the most culturally distinctive video games ever built in Europe: a single persistent universe shared by all players, with a player-driven economy, alliances, and wars that have produced academic papers and international news coverage. Founded in 1997, CCP effectively bootstrapped Iceland's modern games industry and remains the anchor of Reykjavik's interactive-entertainment cluster. The studio was acquired by South Korea's Pearl Abyss in 2018 but kept its Icelandic operations and brand, and has since expanded into new IP explorations, third-party developer partnerships, and blockchain-adjacent experiments around player-owned assets. For the directory, CCP illustrates how a small European capital can sustain a live-operations games business at a scale usually associated with Tokyo, Los Angeles, or Helsinki.
Istanbul, Turkey · Startup Dream Games is an Istanbul-based mobile gaming studio founded in 2019 by five industry veterans from Peak Games and Zynga — Soner Aydemir, Ikbal Namli, Eren Shea, Hasan Yilmaz, and Serdar Yilmaz — who decided to bet the studio's entire future on shipping a single, highly polished casual puzzle title rather than the portfolio approach favored by most publishers. That title, Royal Match, launched in 2021 and became one of the highest-grossing mobile games in the world, reportedly generating in the billions of dollars in annual in-app revenue and holding steady top-5 grossing positions on both iOS and Android across multiple major markets. The studio raised over USD 450 million from Index Ventures, Makers Fund, Balderton, and others at valuations above USD 2.75 billion, making it one of the most valuable private gaming companies in Europe. Dream Games is the clearest contemporary example of Turkish mobile-gaming craft scaling into a global consumer business while staying headquartered in Istanbul.