Games are a legal category of their own. A studio is a software company, a publisher counterparty, a consumer-facing platform and a personal data controller at the same time, and the questions that decide its value — who owns the build, what the publishing agreement left behind, whether the option pool can be delivered — do not sit in any single practice. Vircon Legal advises game studios, publishers and the investors backing them, with the founder side as our centre of gravity: the studio preparing to raise, negotiating with a publisher, or working out what it actually owns.
Our gaming and esports practice covers:
- Chain of title in the game: founder and employee assignments under Law No. 5846, contractor and outsourced-team agreements, engine and middleware licensing, third-party asset provenance, open-source review before a commercial release
- Funding rounds for studios: SAFE and convertible instruments, priced rounds, share premium, investor rights that Turkish law can and cannot carry in the articles, option pools that survive contact with the Commercial Code
- Publishing and platform agreements: grant scope, recoupment, term and reversion, change-of-control consents, Steam, App Store, Google Play and console developer arrangements
- Player data: telemetry, device identifiers and advertising SDKs under the KVKK regime, cross-border transfer bases, children’s audiences and age assurance
- In-game economies: virtual items, user-generated content and mods, in-app purchase and refund obligations, randomised reward mechanics and where they sit against Turkish law
- Esports: player and team contracts, the employment classification question, tournament and sponsorship arrangements
- Cross-border structuring: when a UK or US holding company is genuinely required, what a flip costs, and how to keep development incentives attached to the Turkish entity
- Exits: share and asset deals, acqui-hires, and the diligence a foreign acquirer runs on a Turkish studio
The studio side of a round
Most of the value we add sits before the term sheet rather than after it. A studio whose founders came out of another studio starts from a statutory position that favours their former employer, and an investor who acquires rights from someone not entitled to transfer them is unprotected even in good faith. A publishing agreement signed a year earlier can carry a change-of-control consent that turns into a closing condition nobody priced. An option pool agreed in a model can turn out not to be deliverable in that form under Turkish law. None of these are exotic; all of them are cheaper to resolve before the money moves.
Our Game Studio Funding Readiness Checklist sets out the 29 items a Turkish studio is asked about when raising, across chain of title, publishing, player data, team and equity, and corporate readiness.
Representative work
- Hungri Games on its Series A round, and earlier on its USD 1.1M seed round
- Tiplay on its pre-Series A round and secondary, following two earlier seed rounds
- No Surrender Games on its seed round
- Angelic on its future token sales backed by Animoca and Solana
- Metaverse Game Studios on corporate structuring and its financing round
- Loop Games and Pethereum on structuring and token work
We also take part in the sector rather than only advising it: moderating the main hall at HyperGames Summit and speaking on Web3 and the metaverse in İstanbul.
Reading
- Gaming Law in Türkiye: the framework for studios, publishing deals and esports teams
- AI in Games: generated assets, LLM-driven NPCs and player data
- Game Studio Funding Readiness Checklist: the 29-item list, with a PDF you can take into a board meeting
Related practice areas
This practice works alongside Startup Law, Corporate Law, Intellectual Property, Privacy & Cybersecurity and US Company Formations & Flip-Ups, because a studio question rarely sits in one bucket.