Tugbek Olek on Turkiye's Incentives at PGC SF 2024

Istanbul doesn't usually come up in the same sentence as London when people talk about European game development. Tugbek Olek made that case anyway, at Pocket Gamer Connects San Francisco 2024, and he backed it with numbers.

Setimedia Co-Founder Tugbek Olek was there as part of the Games from Turkiye delegation attending GDC 2024, speaking in his capacity as head of the TOGED Advisory Board. The argument he put forward wasn't promotional positioning. It was built on Startups.watch data that counted approximately 785 game startups in Turkiye at the time, deliberately excluding the obvious names: Peak Games, Dream Games, Rollic. Strip out the giants and you still have a market that's hard to dismiss. With roughly half of those studios concentrated in Istanbul, the city's claim to being the largest game development hub in Europe after London starts to look less like a pitch and more like an observation.

The talk moved into the practical infrastructure behind that growth. Turkiye's support mechanisms for game developers are unusually direct. The government covers 50% of salaries for up to two development staff, capped at $50,000. International event participation gets up to 80% of travel, accommodation, and booth costs reimbursed. And in a move that addresses one of the industry's most persistent structural irritants, developers can recover 50% of platform commissions up to $100,000 when Apple or Google take their standard 30% cut. That last one tends to get attention in rooms full of publishers and investors.

The audience at Pocket Gamer Connects SF was exactly the kind of crowd that matters for what Turkiye's industry needs next: international publishers, platform partners, and capital looking for the next market to take seriously. By 2024, that attention was already building. The talk helped put concrete shape to something that had mostly been discussed in regional terms.

Here's the full talk: