Playops Studio is betting on testing a mobile game idea before investing significant time and resources in developing it. The startup, founded by Gürkan Üstünkar in February 2026, relies on a network of 14 AI agents and 64 automation workflows to analyze trends, prepare game concepts, and create advertising campaigns that measure user interest.
The company operates in hybrid casual games and presents itself simultaneously as a game studio and publisher. Its team includes six full-time employees, along with part-time staff, with expertise in product management, game operations, monetization optimization, Unity development, and visual design. It also plans to hire someone with user acquisition and growth experience.
How does the system work?
The Trendscout agent analyzes signals from gaming trends on YouTube and TikTok, as well as from games topping the App Store and Google Play charts. Based on a scoring model and using OpenAI architecture, the agent creates game design documents.
AssetArchitect then turns these documents into concepts for game screens, while QuantUA tests the concepts through advertising campaigns. Before building a playable prototype, the system creates concept images, 16-second advertisements, and automated web pages, then presents them to users through Meta ads.
Test results and limitations
Playops Studio said it has tested 160 game concepts so far. Sixty concepts stood out in click-through-rate and landing-page-view-cost metrics and were added to the development list. The campaign advertisements reached approximately 3 million people.
However, these figures measure initial interest in the concept, not the game's long-term success. The company acknowledges that game performance needs to be evaluated after development, an important limitation on the use of what it calls “Fake Door,” meaning presenting an idea that has not yet been developed to users through an advertisement or landing page.
What changes in practice?
Playops Studio shifts part of the project-selection decision from intuition alone toward relatively low-cost early testing. Instead of fully developing every idea, the team can rank concepts according to initial advertising signals before allocating programming, operations, and monetization-optimization resources. However, higher engagement with an advertisement or page does not prove user-retention potential or the ability to generate sustainable revenue.
The technical infrastructure was built on Google Cloud, Supabase, Slack, n8n, Atlassian, and GitHub, and the company managed to run its first advertising campaign about two months after beginning to build the system. The agents run on Google Cloud as FastAPI services, while n8n manages workflows, and Slack is used to communicate, review the agents' outputs, and modify them.
The next stage and funding
The company published three games that passed the advertising tests on the App Store and Google Play to test development, integration, in-game operations, and the monetization-optimization infrastructure. These games accumulated approximately 300 downloads in total, and the company ended their testing after two weeks, while preparing to launch three new games.
Playops Studio has also completed submitting test versions to the stores after code changes. The company currently finances its operations through its founder and plans to generate revenue from in-app purchases and advertisements. Üstünkar is targeting the start of a pre-seed funding round in about two months to expand the team and support advertising budgets.
The company is working to expand testing from concept images to playable web prototypes, so that the game design document approved through Slack is automatically turned into a prototype, with the advertising video prepared as part of the same process. The value of this approach remains tied to its ability to predict game performance after launch, not merely to improving the speed of idea testing.