Google is working with Patika to superpower the game industry with the first-of-its-kind Casual Game Art & Development bootcamps

About Google

Google is a multi-industry technology company that specializes in Internet-related services and products, which include online advertising technologies, a search engine, cloud computing, software and hardware.

Why Google and the game industry?

Google offers solutions throughout the lifecycle of gaming businesses.
It has a collection of great tools that helps games across their entire lifecycle and access to billions of users each day. Combination of these tools and the increasing talent need of fast-rising Turkish game industry motivated Google to invest in talent development for the game sector.

The games industry is growing much more than during pre-pandemic times all over the world. With an average yearly growth of 8.7%, the games market will reach $218 billion in 2024.

Around 2.8 billion of the world’s 3.0 billion gamers play on a mobile device, and ~60% of all mobile game players are casual gamers. Turkey is especially in a special place: With several unicorn game companies, Istanbul is becoming the ‘Silicon Valley’ for mobile games.

Growth of the sector comes with high interest of new talent to join game companies; still, there is a significant shortage of talent. One reason is the need for many new job roles such as level designer, game marketer, game designer. Lack of educational resources (most formal institutions still don’t provide relevant training) coupled with these fast changing industry needs limit the growth potential of the sector.
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Data: Newzoo

Google decided to help game companies unlock their potential with the help of new talent. At Patika, we worked with Google to identify the most urgent talent needs and came up with game development and game art as the first two roles to focus on.

We received 1,000+ applications for our Casual Mobile Game Development and Game Art bootcamps  that run between April - July 2021. After assessments and interviews, 60 high potential talent (43% female) were accepted.

An important aspect of game companies is teamwork. We designed the cohorts to simulate real-life: All admitted talent first received game design training, and then specialized into their field. In the last 4 weeks, game artists had to work with developers to develop a Galaxy Destroyer project.

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After the cohorts, many game companies started to engage with us to hire these already trained and highly skilled talent: In total 28 companies hired the graduates! Demand for game artists was higher than that of game developers; showing us the need for talent in these relatively new roles.

The bootcamps also helped many participants launch their career in games industry:

💪 Sennur Yektay, a lawyer with 3-year of work experience at law companies, quit her job to join the bootcamp. She then started working as a 3D game artist in only 4 weeks of graduation!

🐣 Abdulsamed Ünal, a History department graduate, also started to work as a 3D game artist in only 6 weeks!

🎮 Rabia Tezcan, a Biomedical Engineer, launched her career as a game developer in only 2 weeks of graduation!

“Bootcamp was full of new content, projects, and workshops. Our progress inspired me to quit my job as a lawyer and commit myself into Game Art!"

“Onboarding into my new job wasn’t challenging at all - because we already experienced almost everything that we would face in the industry during the bootcamps.”