A player who has spent three years and a month’s salary on a legendary sword believes she owns it. The studio’s end-user licence agreement says she has a revocable, non-transferable, limited licence to use it in the game. When the account is banned, the servers are shut down or the sword is traded to a stranger for cash, the two beliefs collide, and Turkish law has a clear answer to the first question and an uncomfortable one for studios on the second. Virtual items are not property in the Civil Code sense, so the player’s rights are whatever the contract gives her; but the contract is a set of general terms and conditions that the Code of Obligations No. 6098 (TBK) and the Consumer Protection Law No. 6502 police closely, and the content players create inside the game is theirs under the Law on Intellectual and Artistic Works No. 5846 (FSEK) unless the studio has taken a licence back in the form that Law requires. Add the hosting-provider and, from 1 November 2026, the game-platform duties of Law No. 5651 for whatever players upload, and a game with a marketplace, a level editor or a chat is a small platform with a platform’s legal exposure. This article covers the property question, the EULA as general terms, player authorship and the licence-back, mods, the 5651 layer, and the account-termination clause that ties them together. It follows our 5651 gaming platform guide and AI in games.
Licence, not property
Ownership under Articles 683 and following of the Civil Code No. 4721 attaches to things (eşya), corporeal objects that can be possessed; a data record on the studio’s server that renders as a sword is not a thing, and Turkish law, like most continental systems, does not recognise ownership of it by the player. What the player has is a bundle of contractual rights against the studio: to have the item available in her account, to use it as the game allows, and to whatever else the terms promise. That framing is the studio’s protection and its constraint. It protects the studio from claims that a nerf, a rebalancing or a server shutdown is a taking of property. It constrains the studio because the contractual promises are made through general terms, and Turkish law treats a consumer who paid real money for a digital good as having bought a service or an intangible good with a warranty of conformity: the item must work as described for as long as the terms and reasonable expectations say it should. Blockchain-based items do not change the analysis of the item itself; a token records a claim, and the claim is still against whoever runs the game. Where tokens are tradeable for value, the capital-markets and gambling questions we discussed in RWA tokenisation and the loot box article arrive on top.
The EULA as general terms under TBK 20 to 25
Article 20 of the TBK defines general terms as contract provisions prepared in advance by one party for use in many similar contracts and presented to the other party; a EULA, terms of service and marketplace rules are the paradigm. Article 21 makes terms adverse to the other party part of the contract only if the drafter expressly informed the other party of their existence and gave the opportunity to learn their content at the time of contracting, and the other party accepted them; otherwise they are deemed unwritten, and terms alien to the nature of the contract and the character of the business are deemed unwritten in any case. Article 23 interprets unclear or ambiguous terms against the drafter. Article 24 deems unwritten any clause that gives the drafter the right unilaterally to change the terms or introduce new rules to the other party’s detriment. Article 25 prohibits terms that, contrary to good faith, are to the other party’s detriment or aggravate her position. Against a consumer, Article 5 of Law 6502 adds that unfair terms, those not negotiated individually and creating a significant imbalance contrary to good faith, are void. The consequences for a typical game EULA are direct: the “we may change these terms at any time” clause is unwritten under Article 24; the route practice accepts is a change mechanism with advance notice and a right to terminate, although the text of Article 24 itself contains no such exception; the “we may terminate your account and delete all items for any reason without refund” clause is exposed under Articles 25 and 6502/5 unless termination is for defined cause with a proportionate process; the “all virtual items are our property and have no value” clause is fine as a statement about property but does not defeat the consumer’s conformity and refund rights for paid items; and the clickwrap flow must actually give the player the chance to read before accepting, which a pre-ticked box or a link buried below the button does not.
Player creations: authorship and the licence-back
Where the game lets players build levels, design skins, compose music or write stories, the results that carry the creator’s individuality (hususiyet) are works under Article 1/B of FSEK and their author is the player who created them (Article 8(1)). Where the creation adapts the studio’s assets, it is a derivative work (işlenme), whose author is the adapter but whose exploitation requires the original author’s permission because adaptation is the studio’s exclusive right under Article 21; Article 8(2) preserves the original author’s rights. The studio therefore holds a veto over derivative content by virtue of owning the underlying assets, but it does not thereby own the player’s contribution, and a studio that wants to use player-made content in trailers, in the game for other players or in merchandise needs a licence from the player. FSEK imposes its form rules here: Article 52 requires contracts on economic rights to be in writing and to itemise the rights, and Article 48(3) voids present dispositions over works not yet created, with Article 50 rescuing undertakings to grant. A EULA clause under which the player “hereby grants a perpetual, worldwide, royalty-free licence in all user content” is an attempt to take a present licence over future works through a clickwrap, and its enforceability against a Turkish author is doubtful on both counts. The safer architecture is layered: the toolset is designed so that player content is technically a derivative of studio assets, which gives the studio Article 21 control over its exploitation; the terms contain an undertaking to grant an itemised licence, restated and accepted at the moment of each upload with a durable record; and content the studio actually wants to commercialise is licensed individually by a short written agreement with the creator, who is credited and, where appropriate, paid. Moral rights under Articles 14 to 16 (disclosure, attribution, integrity) remain with the player and cannot be assigned, so the terms should address attribution and the studio’s right to modify content within the game rather than pretend the rights do not exist.
Mods
A mod is a derivative work of the game or an addition that runs with it; either way it uses the studio’s copyright, and the modder needs permission that in practice comes from a mod policy or the EULA. The studio can therefore set the terms: non-commercial only, no circumvention of technical protection measures (which Article 72 of FSEK addresses separately), no distribution of the studio’s assets outside the game, takedown on request, and a licence-back for mods the studio wants to integrate, subject to the same FSEK form limits as other user content. Because modders are authors of their own contribution, a mod policy that claims ownership of all mods is both unenforceable and unnecessary; the studio needs control over distribution and a route to integrate, not ownership. Where mods are sold through an official marketplace with revenue share, the studio is intermediating consumer sales and the distance-selling and platform duties in our in-app purchases article apply.
The 5651 layer
Law No. 5651 makes the content provider responsible for the content it places online (Article 4(1)) and defines the hosting provider as the person who provides or operates the systems hosting services and content; a game that stores player uploads, chat or marketplace listings is a hosting provider for that content. Article 5 states that the hosting provider is not obliged to monitor the content it hosts or to investigate whether it is unlawful, but must remove unlawful content on being notified under Articles 8 and 9, must retain traffic data for the period set by regulation (between one and two years) and must make the hosting-provider notification, with administrative fines for failing to do so. Since Law No. 7578 of 22 April 2026 the Law also defines games, game developers, game distributors and game platforms, the last being anyone providing the software or technical infrastructure for displaying, selling, distributing, downloading or playing digital games and related content online, or coordinating access, licence management or user interaction, and its new Additional Article 5 imposes obligations on game platforms from 1 November 2026, which our 5651 gaming platform guide sets out; since Law No. 7590 of July 2026 the competent authority is the Cybersecurity Presidency. A game whose social features make it a social network provider also faces Additional Article 4: from 1 November 2026 every social network provider must keep children under fifteen out (with age verification) and offer parental controls, and above one million daily accesses from Türkiye come forty-eight-hour response duties, periodic reporting and, for foreign-based providers, a local representative. For most studios the operational answer is a notice-and-takedown process with a Turkish-language contact point, a content-moderation record and a legal-hold procedure for traffic data.
Account termination: the clause that ties it together
Everything above converges on the termination clause. It should define the causes (cheating, fraud, harassment, chargebacks, legal requirements), give a process proportionate to the consequence (warning, temporary suspension, permanent ban with a review route), state what happens to paid items and unspent currency (forfeiture only for serious cause; otherwise refund of unused paid balances or a wind-down period), address the player’s own content (export or continued licence), and reserve the right to close the service with reasonable notice and a defined treatment of recent purchases. Drafted that way, the clause survives Articles 24 and 25 of the TBK and Article 5 of Law 6502; drafted as “we can do anything for any reason”, it survives neither, and a consumer arbitration committee will say so.
Can we say in the EULA that players own nothing?
You can say they have a licence and no property right, and that is correct. You cannot use that statement to escape conformity and refund duties for items they paid for, or to terminate and forfeit without cause. Say what they do have, and make it fair.
Is a clickwrap licence-back of user content enforceable in Türkiye?
Doubtful as a present licence over future works, because of FSEK Articles 48 and 52. Structure it as an undertaking, re-accept at each upload with a durable record, design tools so content is derivative of your assets, and paper individually the content you commercialise.
Do we have to moderate every chat message?
No; Article 5 of Law 5651 says hosting providers need not monitor. You must remove unlawful content when notified, keep traffic data, and meet the social-network duties that apply to you and, if the game qualifies as a game platform, the game-platform duties. Proactive filtering is good practice and expected by the stores, but the legal duty is reactive.
Related: know-how · B2C · terms of service under Turkish law · game publishing agreements.
Sources. Turkish Code of Obligations No. 6098 (Articles 20–25); Consumer Protection Law No. 6502 (Article 5); Law on Intellectual and Artistic Works No. 5846 (Articles 1/B, 8, 14–16, 21, 48, 50, 52, 72); Law No. 5651 on the Regulation of Publications on the Internet (Articles 2, 4, 5, 8, 9, Additional Articles 4–5, as amended by Laws No. 7578 and 7590); Turkish Civil Code No. 4721 (Article 683). Statute links open the official Turkish texts on mevzuat.gov.tr.
This article is provided for general information only and does not constitute legal advice. Please seek legal support for an assessment of any specific matter.
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