Céidot Game Studios

» see ceidot.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Céidot shut its operations down on 19 March 2014, on the day it closed its last running game, Céiron Wars. The staff were already gone: the last employees had been let go in December 2013, and the Turkish trade press, Webrazzi and Oyungezer both, attributed the collapse to long-standing money trouble and to management, rather than to any single failed product.

It had started in 2005 in the Cyberplaza at Bilkent University, which is the kind of address a studio has when its founders have just left school and the university is willing to rent them a room. Erkan Bayol was a co-founder. The first project was Sovereign Symphony, an ambitious Windows game meant to be introduced by realistic 3D short films, and it was abandoned after the first demo shipped. In 2008 the studio moved across Ankara to the METU Technopolis and put out Sovereign Symphony Online, its first browser-based multiplayer attempt.

Both of those addresses are a short drive from where I sit and work now, which makes this the rare grave where the distance is not geographic at all. It is occupational. Through the exact years this studio was failing here, I was writing software here too, and the name never once came past me, because games and the work I do are separate industries that happen to share a city and a technology park.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it landed ~

Foreign investors came in during 2009 and the studio grew to between 35 and 40 people, which made it a serious operation by Turkish standards of the period. It ran a game portal called Playtak, worked on a title called Football Arena, and licensed Gamebryo from Emergent Game Technologies, the middleware that a lot of mid-size studios leaned on rather than writing an engine. There was a corporate branch registered in Oregon. Céidot was formally a brand of the Imengi Design Company, with a sibling brand, Céiron Alternative Reality, that existed to hold the fiction.

~ the unraveling ~

The pattern across nine years is a studio that kept reaching past its budget. Sovereign Symphony was supposed to be a Windows game with animated films attached and ended as one demo. Sovereign Symphony Online was the browser version of an idea that had already proved too big once. Football Arena does not appear to have reached anybody. Meanwhile Umaykut, the thing that actually worked, got sold.

That sale is the hinge. Umaykut reached three million users and went to Peak Games in 2010, the same year Peak itself was founded. Selling your one hit to fund the rest of the slate is a defensible decision in the moment and a fatal one in retrospect, because the slate never produced a second hit and the buyer turned into the biggest story in Turkish technology. Peak sold to Zynga a decade later for 1.8 billion dollars.

~ the people it made ~

The thing Céidot actually produced, and the only thing that outlived it, was people. Webrazzi's farewell made the point directly: former Céidot employees went on to found or staff leading Turkish game companies. Nine years of learning to ship online multiplayer in a country where that skill barely existed yet, paid for partly by foreign investors, amounts to a training institution whether or not anybody set out to build one.

Turkey became a genuine force in mobile games in the decade after 2014, to the point where the big international exits started coming out of Istanbul regularly. The usual telling of that story starts in 2010 with Peak. It could as easily start in a rented room at Bilkent in 2005.

~ the funny part ~

The logo is still the clearest surviving statement of what the place thought it was. A chrome wordmark reading CÉIDOT, with an eye set into the O, the word STÜDYOLARI underneath, and then four words in Turkish along the bottom: Céiron, Dijital, Oyun, Tasarım. A fictional universe listed first, ahead of every word that described the actual business. The domain printed along the bottom edge, www.ceidot.com, still has an address today and nothing answering behind it.

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