When a publisher sells your game: claiming the commission

Plenty of studios do not sell their own product abroad. A publisher handles a territory, a distributor covers a platform, an agent brings enterprise deals in a market where you have no presence. They take a percentage, and that percentage is one of the larger numbers on the income statement.

Article 6 of Decision No. 10962 reimburses half of it, up to 6,000,000 TL of support a year, which is around $126,000 at roughly 47.7 TRY to the dollar. At 50%, that covers about $252,000 of commission paid before the cap binds. Each company can use the item for up to five years.

The rate is ordinary. The condition attached to it is not, and it is the reason this item is claimed less often than it should be.

The agent has to be on a list

Article 10 of the circular ties the whole item to one document: commissions are supported where they are paid to agents on the Ministry's Agents List, annex EK-7.

That list is not a directory of approved international publishers sitting somewhere waiting to be consulted. It is built from applications. A company that wants to claim on commissions applies to the Services Exporters' Association to have its agent added, submitting a defined set of information and documents obtained from the agent itself.

Two things follow from that, and both are practical rather than legal.

The first is timing. Adding an agent takes as long as it takes, and it runs partly on the agent's willingness to produce paperwork about their own business. Starting that when a claim is already due is the wrong order.

The second is goodwill. You need cooperation from a counterparty who gets nothing out of the exercise. That conversation is far easier during a negotiation, when you are agreeing terms anyway, than eighteen months later when you are asking a busy publisher for corporate documents as a favour.

There is also a document step behind it. Where the paperwork about a foreign agent was issued abroad, the Services Exporters' Association may require it to be approved by the Ministry's representation in that country. Manageable, and another argument for starting early.

What triggers the claim

The filing point is the sale, not the signature. The support application is made after the overseas sale or distribution that the commission relates to has happened.

For a studio with a publisher shipping across several territories through the year, that means the claim follows the sales calendar. Each commission payment then carries the ordinary six-month filing window, so the rhythm is quarterly rather than annual.

Where this sits against the other items

Studios sometimes assume this item replaces store commissions. It does not, and mixing them up costs money in both directions.

Platform commissions cover what Apple, Google, Steam and the console stores deduct from sales you make yourself, under a separate item with its own annual and per-product caps.

Agent commissions cover what you pay a third party to sell or distribute on your behalf.

A studio selling directly on stores in Europe and North America while a publisher handles Japan and Korea is claiming under both, against two separate caps. Neither crowds out the other.

Where the line gets blurry is a revenue-share arrangement with no identifiable commission, or a publishing deal where the publisher is the seller of record and simply pays you a share. Those need reading against the contract rather than against the label, because the programme responds to what the payment actually is.

What the file needs

Once the agent is listed, the evidence is ordinary and looks like every other claim in the programme.

• The agency or publishing agreement, showing the commission arrangement
• The invoice or statement for the commission itself
• Proof of payment from the company's own account, or evidence of how the commission was settled
• Evidence that the overseas sale or distribution the commission relates to actually happened

The last one is the item that separates this from a simple invoice claim. The commission has to attach to a sale abroad, so the file connects a payment to a transaction rather than just showing money leaving the account.

Where the publisher deducts its commission from your revenue instead of invoicing you, the file has to make the deduction visible and traceable to specific sales. Publisher statements usually do this well, because they are built for exactly that purpose, but they need keeping in a form that a reviewer can follow.

Under the Branding Programme

Agent commissions are one of the expenses supported under the Branding Programme at 50% with no fixed per-item cap, counting against the overall annual ceiling instead of against the 6,000,000 TL figure.

That changes the picture for a company whose overseas sales run substantially through partners. A SaaS business selling into several regions through local resellers, or a studio with publishing arrangements across Asia, can pay far more than $252,000 a year in commission. Under the Standard Programme the cap arrives quickly. Under Branding it does not arrive at all until the programme ceiling does.

Worth the effort or not

The arithmetic is easy to run. A studio paying $200,000 a year in publisher commission recovers $100,000, and does so for five years, which is $500,000 against a listing exercise that happens once per agent.

For a studio paying $20,000 a year to a single small agent, the same exercise returns $10,000 and probably still clears the bar, but it belongs at the back of the queue behind the items that pay more for less work.

The decision point is really about the contract. If a publishing or distribution deal is being negotiated now, the cost of adding a clause about cooperating with documentation is nothing, and it makes the item available for the life of the relationship. If the deal was signed three years ago and the counterparty has since been acquired, it is a harder conversation.

That is the argument for looking at this before the ink dries rather than after. The calculator covers the item alongside the rest, and it is usually the caps on advertising and store commissions that dominate the total, with this one sitting behind them.