Every Turkish game studio signs at least one contract it did not negotiate. The Steam Distribution Agreement, the Apple Developer Program License Agreement and the Google Play Developer Distribution Agreement are click-through documents governed by foreign law, changed unilaterally by the platform, and enforced through the one lever that matters: the studio’s account. They decide how much of each sale the studio keeps, when it is paid, in which currency, what the studio may say to its own players about buying elsewhere, and how quickly a game can disappear from the store. This article reads those agreements through Turkish law: what the general-terms rules of Articles 20 to 25 of the Turkish Code of Obligations No. 6098 (TBK) can and cannot do against a foreign-law contract; how commission, payout and tax mechanics actually work for a Turkish company; what “seller of record” means for consumer refunds and VAT; how delisting and account termination clauses operate and what remedies exist; whether the intermediary rules of the E-Commerce Law No. 6563 reach the stores; and what the EU Digital Markets Act (DMA) changes for a studio’s European sales. It builds on our publishing agreement and in-app purchases articles and on the gaming law guide.
Standard terms and TBK 20–25
Article 20 of the Code of Obligations defines general terms and conditions as contract terms prepared in advance by one party, alone, for use in many similar future contracts and presented to the other party; whether they appear in the contract or an annex, their scope, typeface and form are irrelevant, and a clause stating that each term was individually negotiated does not by itself take them out of the definition. Platform agreements are the textbook case. Article 21 makes terms contrary to the counterparty’s interest part of the contract only if the drafter expressly informed the counterparty of their existence, gave it the opportunity to learn their content and the counterparty accepted them, failing which they are deemed unwritten; terms alien to the nature of the contract are also unwritten. Article 22 keeps the rest of the contract alive, Article 23 construes ambiguous terms against the drafter, Article 24 deems unwritten any clause allowing the drafter to amend or add terms unilaterally against the counterparty, and Article 25 prohibits terms that, contrary to good faith, are to the counterparty’s detriment or aggravate its position. Two limits matter for a studio. First, the rules apply between merchants as well: the Code does not confine them to consumers, and Turkish scholarship applies them to business-to-business standard terms, although the merchant’s duty of prudence under Article 18(2) of the Commercial Code is used to raise the bar for what counts as surprising or unfair. Second, and decisively, the platform agreements choose a foreign governing law and forum. Under Article 24 of the Private International Law Act No. 5718 that choice is valid, and a Turkish court would apply Articles 20 to 25 only if it treated them as overriding mandatory rules under Article 6 of that Act, which is not settled; in the forum the platform chose, Turkish general-terms law is unlikely to be applied at all. The Code of Obligations is therefore a strong argument in a Turkish court against a Turkish platform or a Turkish publisher, and a weak one against Valve, Apple or Google. What a studio can realistically do is read the unilateral-amendment and termination clauses knowing that Article 24 would strike them under Turkish law, document its acceptance of each version, and keep its own player-facing terms compliant with Turkish consumer law regardless of what the platform’s terms say.
Commission, payouts and the seller of record
The commercial core is simple: the platform sells the game or the in-app item to the player, keeps a commission and remits the balance to the studio. At the time of writing the published terms provide for a standard commission of around thirty per cent, with reduced rates in defined cases: Apple’s Small Business Program and Google Play’s first-million tier at fifteen per cent for smaller developers, and Steam’s revenue-share tiers that reduce the platform’s share once a title passes published revenue thresholds; these figures change, are set by the platform and should be checked against the current agreement rather than relied on from any article. Payout terms typically run monthly, thirty to forty-five days after the end of the month, subject to minimum balances, in a currency the studio selects, with the platform converting local-currency sales at its own rates and deducting refunds, chargebacks and taxes it collects. For a Turkish company the accounting consequence follows from who the seller is. On the App Store and Google Play the platform is the merchant of record for the sale to the end user: it issues the receipt, collects VAT under the rules for electronically supplied services, including the Turkish VAT that non-resident electronic service providers register for and remit under Article 9 of the Value Added Tax Law No. 3065 and the “No. 3 VAT return” regime for sales to Turkish consumers, and handles the consumer’s statutory rights. Steam’s agreement likewise has Valve selling to the end user. The studio’s revenue is therefore the net remittance, invoiced to the platform as a service or licence fee; whether that invoice is a VAT-exempt export of services under Articles 11 and 12 of the VAT Law depends on the service being used abroad, which for a foreign platform reselling worldwide is usually accepted but should be confirmed with the studio’s advisers, since the tax administration’s rulings on platform income have not been uniform. Turkey’s Digital Services Tax under Law No. 7194, set at seven and a half per cent in the Law but reduced by Presidential Decision No. 10767 to five per cent from 1 January 2026 and to two and a half per cent from 1 January 2027, is levied on the platform’s Turkish digital-service revenue above the statutory thresholds, not on the developer, although platforms have passed it on through price adjustments. Consumer refunds are the platform’s decision under its own policy, and the studio’s share is clawed back; our in-app purchases article explains why the fourteen-day withdrawal right under the Distance Contracts Regulation usually does not survive the start of a download that the consumer expressly consented to, and why purchases by minors are the studio’s problem as well as the platform’s.
Delisting and account termination
The clauses studios fear most are the ones that let the platform remove a title, withhold payouts or terminate the developer account for breach of the agreement or of the content guidelines, often with a short cure period or none, with appeals run by the platform itself. The remedies under Turkish law are thin where foreign law governs, but not absent. If the account holds unpaid balances, the platform owes them as a debt under the agreement, and most agreements say so expressly even on termination; a refusal to pay out earned revenue is a contractual claim in the chosen forum. If the studio contracted through a Turkish publisher or a Turkish platform, Articles 24 and 25 of the Code of Obligations apply squarely: a clause allowing termination at the drafter’s discretion without objective criteria is vulnerable, and Article 27 voids terms contrary to mandatory law and morality. Where Law No. 6563 applies, discussed next, suspending or terminating a service provider without an objective criterion in the intermediation agreement, or because it complained to a public authority, is a per se unfair commercial practice under Additional Article 1(2)(e). Practically, a studio protects itself by keeping the account in the company’s name rather than a founder’s, by separating titles across accounts where the platform permits, by keeping build and key inventories outside the platform, and by keeping its direct-to-player channel alive under the steering rules the DMA now imposes in the EU.
Law No. 6563: are the stores “intermediary service providers”?
The E-Commerce Law defines an intermediary service provider as one that provides the electronic environment for others’ economic and commercial activities, and, since Law No. 7416 of 2022, an electronic commerce intermediary service provider (ETAHS) as an intermediary that enables contracts or orders for the goods or services of electronic commerce service providers in an electronic commerce marketplace. Additional Article 1 prohibits unfair commercial practices by an ETAHS against the service providers on its marketplace and lists practices that are unfair in all cases: failing to pay the service provider in full within five business days of the later of receipt of the sale price and delivery of the order to the buyer; forcing the service provider into campaign sales, including by changing the sale price unilaterally; failing to set the commercial relationship out in a written or electronic intermediation agreement that is clear and easily accessible; making retroactive or unilateral amendments to the agreement to the service provider’s detriment, or including a clause permitting them; charging for services not provided or not specified in the agreement; and downgrading, restricting, suspending or terminating the service provider without an objective criterion in the agreement or because it applied to a public authority or court. Additional Article 2 adds obligations that scale with net transaction volume, including a bar on intermediaries above the first volume tier (set in the Law at a net transaction volume of ten billion lira in a calendar year, a figure the Ministry of Trade updates every year and announced in March 2026 as about 79.2 billion lira) using service providers’ data to compete with them and a duty to allow free data portability. Whether these provisions reach Steam, the App Store or Google Play for their dealings with Turkish studios is unsettled: the platform sells as merchant of record rather than merely enabling the studio’s contract with the player, which sits awkwardly with the ETAHS definition; the provisions were written with domestic marketplaces in mind; and enforcement against non-resident platforms has, to our knowledge, not been tested in published decisions. The Ministry of Trade’s ETBİS registration obligations we described in our ETBİS article do apply to a Turkish studio that sells directly from its own site. The safer reading for a studio is to treat Law No. 6563 as a benchmark for what a Turkish court would consider fair rather than as an enforceable code against the global stores, and to note that the Law No. 7578 amendments to Law No. 5651, which added game and game-platform definitions and platform obligations from 1 November 2026, address content and user protection rather than the developer relationship; see our 5651 amendments guide.
The EU Digital Markets Act and a Turkish studio’s European sales
Regulation (EU) 2022/1925, the DMA, applies from 2 May 2023 to gatekeepers designated by the European Commission for their core platform services, which include the major mobile app stores and operating systems. Its obligations benefit “business users” wherever they are established, in respect of end users in the Union, so a Turkish studio’s EU sales are within its protection. Article 5(4) requires the gatekeeper to allow business users, free of charge, to communicate and promote offers to end users acquired through the platform, including on different terms, and to conclude contracts with them whether or not through the platform; Article 5(5) requires it to allow end users to access, through the platform, content and items they bought from the business user elsewhere; Article 5(7) prohibits requiring business users to use the gatekeeper’s identification service, browser engine or payment service, including in-app purchase systems, for services provided through the platform; Article 6(4) requires operating-system gatekeepers to allow and technically enable third-party app stores and sideloading; Article 6(12) requires fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory general conditions of access to app stores, with an alternative dispute-settlement mechanism; and Article 6(13) prohibits disproportionate termination conditions. The practical consequences for a studio, alternative payment flows, external purchase links and alternative distribution on iOS in the EU, come with platform-specific fee structures that the Commission has been examining, so the economics of “leaving the store” in the EU are not yet stable. None of this applies to Turkish end users, for whom the platform’s standard terms continue to govern, and Türkiye has no equivalent statute in force; the 6563 intermediary rules and the competition-law prohibition of abuse of dominance under Article 6 of Law No. 4054 are the nearest domestic instruments.
Can we refuse a unilateral change to the developer agreement?
In practice only by ceasing to distribute: the agreements condition continued distribution on acceptance of the current version. Under Turkish law Article 24 of the Code of Obligations would deem a unilateral-amendment clause unwritten, but the agreement’s foreign governing law and forum make that argument of little use against the global platforms; document each version you accept and price the risk.
Who is the seller to a Turkish player, and who handles the refund?
On the App Store, Google Play and Steam the platform sells to the player as merchant of record and applies its own refund policy, clawing back the studio’s share; the studio remains responsible for its game’s compliance with consumer and content law and for purchases its design makes possible for minors, as our in-app purchases article explains.
Does the DMA help us with Turkish players?
No. Its obligations attach to gatekeepers in respect of end users in the EU. A Turkish studio benefits for its EU sales, for example through external purchase links and alternative app stores on iOS in the Union, but Turkish players remain under the platform’s standard terms.
Related: DMA · freemium · B2C · gaming law guide.
Sources. Turkish Code of Obligations No. 6098 (Articles 20–27); Law No. 6563 on the Regulation of Electronic Commerce (Article 2, Additional Articles 1–2); Private International Law Act No. 5718 (Articles 6, 24); Value Added Tax Law No. 3065 (Articles 9, 11–12); Law No. 7194 (Digital Services Tax); Regulation (EU) 2022/1925 (Digital Markets Act) (Articles 5–6, 54). Statute links open the official texts on mevzuat.gov.tr and the EU Publications Office.
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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