Sensor Tower, market reports and the data you already pay for

Every studio pays for market intelligence and most treat it as overhead. Store rankings, competitor spend estimates, install data, a commissioned study before entering a new territory. It arrives as a subscription invoice that nobody questions and nobody thinks of as claimable.

Article 23 of Decision No. 10962 covers it at 50%, capped at 2,500,000 TL of support a year, which is about $52,000 at roughly 47.7 TRY to the dollar and covers roughly $105,000 of spending. Each company can use the item for up to five years.

Two conditions come with it, and they work in opposite directions from the rest of the programme.

Reports and databases are treated differently

The circular splits the item in two, and IT companies get both halves.

Database memberships are supported where the provider appears on the Ministry's supported databases list, annex EK-19. Membership in something not on that list does not qualify, however useful it is.

Reports are supported where they carry information on a sector, a country, legislation, foreign companies, or customer and consumer behaviour, bought to help form your overseas market strategy.

Companies in the IT sector can claim both. Consultancy companies, by contrast, only get the database side. If you are a software or games business, both halves are open to you.

The rule that catches everyone

Reports need pre-approval before payment.

Almost everything else in this programme runs the other way. You spend, you keep the invoice, you file inside six months of the payment. This item inverts that for reports: apply first, get approval, then commission the work.

Pay for a report before applying and the support is not available for it. Not delayed, not reduced. Gone.

The pre-approval is not a formality either. The Ministry assesses the provider's experience and expertise, what they have done before, the content of the report, the budget and what the work will actually do for the company. So a report commissioned from a recognised research house with a defined scope is a straightforward application, and a vague retainer with a consultant is a harder one.

Database subscriptions do not carry this step, which is a useful asymmetry. If your spending is mostly subscriptions, the item is simple. If it is mostly commissioned research, the calendar matters.

A worked year

Take a studio running two live titles and preparing a launch in Japan and Korea:

• $26,000 on a store and advertising intelligence subscription, billed annually
• $9,000 on a second data tool for creative research
• $35,000 on a commissioned study of the Japanese and Korean mobile markets

The two subscriptions are claimable if both providers appear on the supported list, and they are filed once each membership year completes, returning $17,500 between them.

The commissioned study is the one that needs handling in the right order. Applied for before commissioning, with a research house that can show relevant experience and a defined scope, it returns $17,500. Paid for first, it returns nothing.

So the same $70,000 of spending is worth either $35,000 or $17,500, and the difference is one application made a few weeks earlier. That is the whole argument for building the pre-approval step into how research gets bought rather than treating it as paperwork at the end.

The other timing rules

Two more details shape when you can file.

A report has to be no more than two years old, measured at the date of the pre-approval application. Buying rights to an older study does not work.

Claims are made after the thing completes. For a report, once it is delivered. For a database subscription, once the membership period ends. So an annual subscription paid in January is claimed the following January, which is a long gap and an easy item to forget. It is the main reason this one goes unclaimed in companies that claim everything else diligently.

There is also a practical condition on subscriptions: you have to be able to provide, without extra charge, the information needed for full access to the database during the membership period. In other words the subscription has to be a real one in your name, not a seat borrowed from someone else's licence.

What studios buy under this

The item is written in general terms, so it helps to see what a software or games business typically has that fits.

• Store and market intelligence subscriptions, the tools that estimate competitor revenue, downloads, rankings and advertising spend by title and country
• Advertising intelligence, showing which creatives and networks competitors are running in which markets
• Country and sector studies commissioned before entering a new territory, covering market size, competitors, pricing and consumer behaviour
• Regulatory studies on what a market requires before you can sell there, which the circular names directly when it lists legislation as report content
• Consumer research into how players or customers in a specific market behave

Read that list against a studio's actual spending and most of it is already happening. The job is not finding new things to buy. It is checking which providers are on the supported list and remembering that reports need approval first.

Under the Branding Programme

Companies admitted to the Branding Programme get this item without the annual cap. Reports and database memberships are among the expenses supported there at 50% with no fixed per-item limit, counting instead against the overall programme ceiling.

For most companies that changes nothing, because 2,500,000 TL a year is already more than they spend on market intelligence. For a company running serious competitive research across many territories, it removes the ceiling entirely.

What it comes to

Nobody moves to Türkiye for this item. A studio spending $40,000 a year across a couple of data subscriptions and one commissioned study gets $20,000 back, and does so for five years.

That is $100,000 for keeping track of two rules, which puts it comfortably ahead of most administrative work available to a company of that size. It also sits alongside every other item rather than competing with them, since the caps are separate.

The way to make it easy is to decide the position once rather than per invoice. Check which of your existing subscriptions are on the supported list and note the renewal dates. Build the pre-approval step into how research gets commissioned, so nobody pays a research house before the application goes in. After that it runs on its own.

The calculator shows this item alongside the ones that carry more weight, and for most studios it will be advertising, store commissions and hosting that dominate the total. This one is the tidy extra that costs almost nothing to collect once the habit exists.