There's a story coming out of Turkey right now that's worth paying attention to no matter where you're building games from, because it's basically a preview of a shift happening everywhere, just further along there than most places.

Emirhan Gül joined a gaming startup in Istanbul as a developer straight out of university. Over five months, he worked on 23 games as Turkey [Türkiye] rode a wave of mobile gaming growth. He described the environment bluntly: budgets were high, the workload was heavy, and the studio hired almost anyone regardless of experience. He burned out.

Since then, he's gone out on his own. And here's the part that matters: when he started his own studio, he didn't need the dozen or so people his old job used to carry a project. He needed two.

The Numbers Behind the Shift

This isn't one guy's anecdote. A Steam-focused event for Turkish studios in 2023 drew 67 applications, mostly from teams of two or three people. The same event a year later drew 254 applications, still overwhelmingly from small teams and solo developers. Fewer traditional studios are forming. Far more individuals and duos are shipping finished games on their own.

Meanwhile, the middle of the ladder, the ten-to-fifty person studio that used to be where a new graduate got their start, is thinning out fast. More than a quarter of gaming industry workers worldwide have been laid off in the past two years, and it's not just small Turkish outfits. Microsoft's Xbox division cut thousands of jobs this same stretch.

The Part That Should Worry Anyone Starting Out

The pattern people keep dancing around is that AI didn't really replace developers as a category. It replaced the junior tier that used to train into senior roles. A studio that once hired five junior programmers to split up a workload now hands that same workload to AI tools and one experienced developer who knows how to direct them. The entry-level rung on the ladder is the one getting kicked out from under people.

Academic voices tracking this locally put it plainly: instead of hiring a handful of junior programmers, a lot of studios are watching one developer do all of it themselves with AI assistance. That's a good deal for the developer who already has the skills to direct the tools. It's a much worse deal for the twenty-two-year-old who was counting on that junior role to build those skills in the first place.

Nobody's Winning Quite as Much as It Looks

Here's the twist, though. Even the solo developers benefiting from all this aren't exactly cashing in. When the tools that let one person ship a game are available to literally everyone, the number of games being released climbs faster than the number of people playing them. The solo dev who replaced five juniors is now competing against ten thousand other solo devs who did the exact same thing. Profit per title keeps getting squeezed even as the barrier to making something drops.

So the picture isn't AI killing game development, and it isn't AI making everyone rich either. It's a genuine tradeoff: the skills needed to make a game solo have gotten dramatically more accessible, while the actual path into the industry, and the odds of any one title standing out once you're there, have both gotten harder. Turkey's just far enough into this shift that the shape of it is visible before it fully lands everywhere else.

Are you seeing this shift where you're building, or does your local scene look different? Let us know your thoughts in the comments. And if you've got a game you'd like us to review, send it over to editor@gamevibe.io.