Matchingham Games

Fatih Haltas, CEO & Co-Founder

London, UK

2023

Building games for everyone

Matchingham Games is a UK-based mobile gaming platform that reaches half a billion people with their free, puzzle-based games.

Founder & CEO Fatih Haltas shares the story of building his mobile gaming company, Matchingham Games.

Let the games begin

New mobile games debut on the Google Play Store every day, so it takes some originality to stand out. That’s why Fatih Haltas, a computer scientist and engineer from London, tried to find a new take on the classic mobile gaming experience.

“I’d just been organically making games for fun since 2013,” says Fatih. “But the first major milestone came in 2019 when I started making riddle- and puzzle-based games, which was a pretty innovative idea at the time. That’s when my company Matchingham Games was born.”

“Now we try to make games that everyone can play, even if that’s just for a few minutes a day,” explains Fatih. “We pack our games with cartoon animations, fun characters, and lots of personality to ensure users come back again and again.”

Fatih and his team focus on creating games they themselves would want to play. But over time, it’s become clear that they aren’t the only ones who enjoy this hybrid casual approach to gaming. So to keep their games free and accessible to their growing fanbase, the team at Matchingham Games has embraced ad monetization.

Celebrations at the Matchingham Games office.

The perfect match

The Matchingham Games team knew their games weren’t targeted to the types of players who would be making in-app purchases, which is a common way mobile gaming platforms monetize. Naturally, advertising became the obvious choice.

“Our players were quite understanding that we would need to put ads in the game to keep all this fun content free,” explains Fatih. “So in order to sustain the business and keep growing, we turned to Google AdMob.”

“Google has some of the best and most popular ad tools on the market, so it was the logical choice for us,” explains Fatih. “We chose AdMob and Google Ads because they’re well-established products that have industry leading capabilities and are optimized for businesses like ours. AdMob has been around for a long time and just works really well for our business.”

From the beginning, Matchingham Games and Google have been the perfect match. “We really love our communication with our account managers. Their responsiveness and support is quite above industry standards.”

Now the majority of Matchingham Games’ revenue comes from ad monetization. “Our ads business has been growing rapidly with over 70% year-over-year growth from 2020-2021 and another 40-50% year-over-year growth from 2022-2023,” says Fatih. All of this growth is supported by ads that don’t restrict their developers’ creativity in the way that in-app purchases might. “If you have to rely on purchases, you’re creating the content the purchasers want ‒ not the content you want to create. Ad monetization lets us keep producing the free content we want to make.”

“Our players were quite understanding that we would need to put ads in the game to keep all this fun content free. So in order to sustain the business and keep growing, we turned to Google AdMob.”

Growing ambitions

As of 2023, Matchingham Games is one of the top 50 gaming companies in terms of installs on Android. Their partnership with Google enables them to keep growing, all while keeping their fun accessible content free to everyone.

Creating that fun marketing that reaches everyone is the best part of Fatih’s job. “We aren’t trying to reach some specific audience segment,” says Fatih. “We’re instead focused on building fun game design on each level, then creating intelligent, catchy marketing that talks to everyone.”

With broad appeal comes broad ambitions. “We have about half a billion installs of our games, which would be 7% of all smartphone users,” says Fatih. “But we really are trying to reach everyone with our games and want to keep growing.”

It all ties back to the original vision for the company, symbolized by the company name. “We’re called Matchingham Games because we want to match the right products with the right audience,” says Fatih. “That’s why we’re always trying to understand our users better so that we can continue to delight them with fun, free games.”

About the Publisher

Fatih Haltas is the founder of Matchingham Games and several technology companies, some of which have been listed as the fastest-growing companies of Europe by the Financial Times. He possesses over 10 years of experience in the mobile app/gaming business, specializing in product design/management publishing, monetization, and user acquisition models and strategies. Additionally, he is a business angel with investments in mobile apps, data analytics, and cybersecurity.