Cyprus is now a top-10 European games country — and studios can only hire 10-40 local grads a year

Cyprus has broken into Europe’s ten largest video game industries by revenue. The first industry report from the Cyprus Game Makers Association (CYGMA) counts 415 game studios and related companies on the island, generating an estimated €3.2 billion from games in 2025.

The numbers worth knowing

• 571 new mobile games released by Cyprus-based publishers, with roughly 615 million downloads — third worldwide, behind China and Vietnam, ahead of the US.
• Mobile generated about €1.8bn; 36 PC and console titles added an estimated €1.4bn.
• Registered gaming companies grew from 169 in 2019 to 393 in 2024. Employment tripled, 1,438 to 4,320 people.
• The sector’s contribution to the economy climbed from around €300m (1.3% of GDP) to €1.15bn (3.3% of GDP).
• Per capita, Cyprus has 415 gaming companies per million residents — against 48 in Finland and 15 in Serbia.

The figures cover companies based in Cyprus rather than games made only by Cypriot founders. That includes Wargaming, Outfit7, Nexters, Playrix, MY.GAMES and Gaijin Entertainment — the studios behind World of Tanks, My Talking Tom, Hero Wars, War Robots and War Thunder.

The part that matters if you are early in your career

CYGMA estimates only 290–385 game-relevant graduates will come out of Cypriot universities in 2026 — of which just three to six arrive through a dedicated gaming pathway. In practice studios can recruit around 10 to 40 local graduates a year, while the industry could absorb 100 to 300 juniors annually.

The association is blunt about why: Cyprus has “no single, nationally recognised front door bachelor’s degree fully dedicated to game-industry talent”. It is now working with local universities on new game-development specialisations that could add 45–85 industry-ready graduates a year.

Until that pipeline exists, the shortest route into a Cyprus studio is a portfolio — shipped prototypes, jam builds, gamethon entries. That is a fair reason to take the next hackathon or gamethon on this calendar seriously.

CYGMA notes its findings are informed estimates from public data rather than audited results, and cover game development and publishing only — not the separately regulated online gambling sector. The association was founded in December 2025, when Cyprus was the last EU member state without a trade body for the industry.

Source