Moving an existing studio to Türkiye: what has to move with it

Studios that decide Türkiye is worth doing usually already exist somewhere else. There is a company, a game on a store, a team, a set of contracts and a payment processor, and none of it was designed to be picked up and carried.

Nothing gets teleported. You incorporate here and then decide, item by item, what moves across and in what order. Some of those decisions are reversible and cheap. One of them determines whether a large part of the programme is available to you at all.

The one that decides everything else

Article 31 of the circular sets a condition on claiming store and platform commissions that is easy to read past: the claiming company has to hold its own account on the platform and market the software, app or game there in its own name.

Read that against a typical migration. If your game stays published under your Delaware or Estonian entity's App Store, Google Play or Steam account while the Turkish company does the development, the commissions on those sales are not claimable by the Turkish company. It does not hold the account and it is not the seller of record.

This is consequential, because store commissions are one of the largest items available to a games or app business, worth up to 20,000,000 TL a year and 4,000,000 TL per product under the Standard Programme. Getting the account transfer wrong does not reduce the claim. It removes it.

Store account transfers are also the slowest part of any migration. Each platform has its own process, its own verification and its own timetable, and none of them move faster because you have a plan. So this is the first thing to start and the thing everything else waits on.

What can be claimed, and from when

The second rule is simpler and shapes the timing of the whole move: support follows payments made by the company that is claiming, out of its own account.

Advertising your previous entity paid for is not claimable here, however recently. Neither is a cloud bill settled by the parent, or a store commission netted off someone else's payout. The programme starts when the Turkish company starts spending.

This is the strongest practical argument for setting the entity up before a large campaign rather than during one. A studio that incorporates in March and runs its big user acquisition push in April claims all of it. A studio that runs the push first and incorporates in June claims none of that spend, and it is usually the largest number of the year.

Once the company exists, each payment carries its own six-month filing window, so there is no requirement to have everything else finished before claiming starts.

Bringing the game itself

There is a rule in the circular that studios hear about and worry about unnecessarily. Each software product, game or app can be supported for one company only, and where the ownership of a previously supported product changes, the spending of the company taking it over is not supported.

That rule is about products that have already been the subject of support under this programme. A title owned by your foreign company that has never been claimed here has no prior beneficiary, so bringing it into a Turkish company does not run into it. Where a Turkish entity has been involved in a title's history, the position is worth confirming for that specific product rather than assuming.

What does need proper attention is the transfer itself. Moving a game from a company you own to another company you own is a transaction between related parties, and it has to be priced on arm's length terms with documentation behind it. That is a question for a tax adviser before it happens, not a form to fill in afterwards, and it is one of the few parts of a move where doing it casually creates a problem that is expensive to unwind.

The team

Salary support covers people employed in the company for the first time, with the first claim due within six months of them starting. So the item is aimed at hiring you do from here on rather than at staff you already have.

For a studio moving in, that shapes the sequence. People you bring onto the Turkish payroll as new employees fall inside the item. Existing arrangements that are simply relabelled are a question of fact about when employment in that company began, and getting that clean at the point of hiring is far easier than arguing it at the point of claiming.

The rest of the team question is the ordinary one. The company needs enough real activity that the claims have evidence behind them, and Türkiye pays for a good deal of that activity.

A sensible order

Most migrations that go smoothly run roughly like this.

1. Incorporate, and choose the company form deliberately, because it affects personal liability for tax debts and how a future sale is taxed.
2. Open the company bank account and route everything through it from the first day, including small subscriptions.
3. Start the platform account transfers, because they are the long pole and they gate the commission claims.
4. Move contracts and billing so that invoices from Meta, Google, AWS and the rest are addressed to the Turkish company.
5. Hire, treating each new person as a first-time employee of this company.
6. File the first claims on whatever is already inside its six-month window, which after a quarter of trading is usually more than founders expect.

What tends to go wrong

Almost every problem we see in a migration is one of three things, and all three are visible in advance.

Invoices still addressed to the old entity, which cannot be claimed no matter how clearly the Turkish company paid for them. Platform accounts left where they were, removing the commission item entirely. And a gap between incorporating and switching the spending across, where months of advertising land in the wrong company.

None of those are legal problems. They are sequencing problems, which is why claims fail on evidence and deadlines rather than on eligibility more often than anything else.

Get the order right and a studio that moves in the first quarter of a year usually claims most of that year. The calculator will show what that is worth against your own spending, and what the target country rate does explains why the answer is often larger than the headline 50%.