How much does Türkiye actually pay back? Three studios, three answers

"How much would we actually get?" is usually the first question. It depends on how much you spend, where your users are, and how many products you spend it behind.

Below are three companies with different cost shapes.

The rate, before the caps

Eligible spending is supported at 50%, rising to 70% when the activity targets a country on the Ministry's list. The list covers the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany and Canada, among others, which is where most studios buy their users anyway.

For a small company that rate is the whole calculation. For a larger one the caps take over, and most of what follows is really about the caps.

Studio one: the indie team

A six-person studio with one title. Around $8,000 a month on user acquisition, a modest cloud bill, and app store commissions that scale with revenue.

At this size the caps do not come into it. Nothing gets near them. The answer is the rate applied to the spend: about half of the advertising and hosting, up to seventy percent of the advertising if the players are in target countries.

The real question here is whether the return covers the cost of running a Turkish company. For a studio spending six figures a year on growth it does, comfortably. Below that it gets closer, and we would rather work through it with you than talk you into it.

Studio two: the growing studio

Twenty-five people, two live titles, $500,000 a year on user acquisition, $200,000 in platform commissions, $80,000 on hosting.

The spending is large enough to matter and still inside the caps on most items. A studio in this shape selling into target countries is looking at a figure in the high six figures coming back annually.

This is also the size where the six-month filing window starts costing money. Every payment carries its own deadline, and at this spending level a quarter of missed invoices is a number you notice. Most companies at this stage have nobody whose job it is to watch those dates. It is rarely carelessness. Marketing runs the campaigns, finance books the invoices, and the filing sits in the gap between the two, which is where things go missing in any company of that size.

Studio three: the portfolio company

Eighty people, five titles, several million a year in combined user acquisition and platform fees.

Here the caps bind before the spending does, so how the spending is arranged starts to matter more than the total.

The two largest caps apply per product, for up to ten products a year. A company running everything behind one flagship hits the cap on that title and stops. The same company spending the same total across five titles has five separate caps to work against.

This is written into the Decision rather than being an interpretation of it, and it changes what a portfolio company should be doing with its media allocation. It is the point clients most often tell us they had not seen, usually a year or so into claiming.

Your own numbers

Three examples are only three examples. Put in what you spend a year on advertising, platform commissions and hosting, and set whether your users are in target countries.

It applies the current rates and caps, shows the per-line breakdown, and flags when a cap starts to bite instead of quietly trimming the total.

What the figure does not include

Three things sit outside the numbers above.

Salary support for newly hired sales, marketing and business development staff. If you are planning hires anyway, when you make them is worth a conversation.

Trade fairs. The stand at GDC or Gamescom is a supported item and very few studios claim it.

The tax side, which is a separate mechanism with its own conditions. Income earned from customers abroad is not taxed under the IT export regime.

What could make the figure smaller

If your product also has a Turkish-language version, support on some items is calculated on half the payment.

If your campaigns span target and non-target countries together, the higher rate does not apply to the mixed activity.

From your second year in the programme, annual payouts are checked against a ceiling tied to your prior-year exports. That one affects companies claiming far more than they export, which is rarer than it sounds but does happen.

None of these change the shape of the answer, only its size.