Armağan Yavuz

Armağan Yavuz is a Turkish video game developer best known as the founder and CEO of TaleWorlds Entertainment, the independent Ankara studio behind the Mount & Blade series, which he started as a hobby project with his wife İpek Yavuz.

Yavuz studied computer engineering at Bilkent University. In the early 2000s he began building a medieval combat game in his spare time, focused on getting mounted and sword fighting right. Members of the gaming community backed the hobby project, and in 2005 he and İpek founded TaleWorlds and started selling early beta versions online. That beta income paid for development, and players built mods for the game long before its retail release, an early example of what would later be called early access.

Swedish publisher Paradox Interactive released Mount & Blade in 2008. It sold more than a million copies and brought in more than $3 million, according to the company. The standalone expansion Mount & Blade: Warband followed in March 2010, and With Fire & Sword came in 2011. Paradox handed the Mount & Blade licence back to TaleWorlds in 2014.

The sequel, Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord, was announced in 2012 and spent years in development. It entered early access in March 2020, reaching nearly 250,000 concurrent players on Steam and becoming the biggest Steam launch of that year, and fully launched on PC and consoles on October 25, 2022. The War Sails expansion arrived in November 2025. TaleWorlds, based in the Hacettepe University technology park in Ankara, has grown into a large studio but remains independent and devoted to a single series. In 2016 it became the first Türkiye-based game company to exhibit at E3. İpek Yavuz, the studio's co-founder and studio head, died in July 2026 at 54.

Yavuz matters because Mount & Blade is one of the great indie success stories: a husband-and-wife hobby project from Turkey, funded by its own players, that grew into a global franchise.