Türkiye's IT export incentives for mobile game studios

A mobile studio's cost structure lines up unusually well with Türkiye's incentive programme. The three biggest lines below revenue for most studios, being user acquisition, store commissions and hosting, are all named claimable items. This post covers what each one pays and, more usefully, where the caps bite.

All caps are set in Turkish lira and revalued upward every calendar year. Dollar figures below are approximate, at roughly 47.7 TRY to the dollar. Article numbers refer to Decision No. 10962; the implementing circular numbers them differently.

The four items that matter

1. Digital product promotion (Article 17). Overseas advertising for an individual game, at 50%, rising to 70% when the campaign targets one of the Ministry's 20 target countries. Up to 10 products a year. Cap: 15,000,000 TRY of support per product (about $314,000) and 50,000,000 TRY a year in total (about $1,047,000). For most studios this is the largest item in the programme.

2. App store and platform commissions (Article 22). The commission Apple, Google, Steam and comparable platforms retain on your overseas sales, at 50%, up to 10 products a year. Cap: 4,000,000 TRY per product (about $84,000) and 20,000,000 TRY a year (about $419,000). Most studios treat the store cut as a fact of life, but a fraction of it is recoverable.

3. Hosting (Article 16). Servers and infrastructure supporting the overseas launch of your game, at 50%, capped at 5,000,000 TRY a year (about $105,000). That covers a meaningful live-ops backend. Products offered only in foreign languages qualify for the full support rate on hosting.

4. Sales and marketing staff in Türkiye (Article 19). Gross salary support for newly hired business development, sales and marketing people, at 50%, up to 5 people, capped at 90,000 TL per person per month (about $1,890). Because it applies only to new hires, the sequencing of your hiring and your application is worth thinking about in advance.

Beyond these four there are events such as GDC and other overseas fairs, trademark registration, market research subscriptions and software licences. All are real, all are smaller.

Worked example: a $3M/year studio

Take a studio doing $3,000,000 of gross overseas store revenue, spending $1,200,000 a year on UA aimed at the US, UK, Germany, Japan and South Korea, $180,000 on hosting, and employing two new marketing hires on $3,000/month gross.

If all of that sits behind a single title:

Now the same spend across four live titles, roughly evenly split:

The spend is identical and the reimbursement is two and a half times larger, because the caps are per product rather than per company. That one fact should shape how a portfolio studio structures its campaigns and its claims. It is also the strongest argument for moving to the Branding Programme once you qualify, since that raises the per-title promotion cap to between 20,000,000 and 25,000,000 TRY and doubles the product count to 20.

The ceiling to watch in year two

From your second year in the programme, annual payouts are checked against a ceiling of one third of prior-year service exports plus foreign-sourced revenue. For the studio above that works out at roughly $1,000,000, so the four-title scenario would be trimmed back to the ceiling, with the remainder claimable in later years.

Your first year is unrestricted, which is a good reason not to leave the first filing until you feel ready.

Common mistakes for mobile studios

• Paying UA from a founder's card. The most common break we see. Spend has to leave the company's own account or card. Ad platforms make personal cards easy to use, and the programme makes them fatal.
• Running one worldwide campaign. Where an activity covers several countries, all of them have to be on the target-country list for the 70% rate. Geo-segmented campaigns preserve the boosted rate on the geographies that qualify.
• Treating store commissions as invisible. They arrive as a net payout rather than an invoice you pay, so they get overlooked. The store's payout report is the evidence.
• Confusing brand marketing with title marketing. Article 11 and Article 17 are separate items with separate caps. Campaigns promoting the studio rather than a game belong in the first.
• Waiting for a quiet quarter. Every payment carries its own six-month filing window. Money spent seven months ago is gone; money spent last month is not.

Next step

Put your real annual figures into the calculator with the target-country toggle on. It applies each item's caps as it goes, so you will see where your own spending hits a ceiling and whether splitting it differently would change the answer.

If you want the portfolio question looked at against your actual title lineup, that is a conversation to have before the next campaign flight rather than after it.