Who Holds the Decision Rights? Acquisitions, Investor Vetoes and Platform Rules in Türkiye’s Mobile Game Industry, 2013–2025

Creative Commons License

Erden A.

SSRN, ss.1-37, 2026 (Hakemsiz Dergi)

Özet

Mobile game studios depend on app stores, engines and advertising networks whose rules they do not set. Policy discussions rarely ask what decision rights over the studios themselves change hands as such industries grow. This article examines Türkiye’s mobile game industry using an original dataset of 44 transactions announced in 2013–2025: 27 funding rounds, fourteen exits, two other changes of control and one recapitalisation. Eleven exits were reconciled with the acquirers’ audited disclosures, and investors’ control rights were determined from Turkish Competition Authority merger decisions. No exit transferred control to a Turkish ultimate parent. All seven partial purchases with quantified accounting were accounted for as purchases of the entire company, with the remaining stake carried as an obligation to buy it, and eight of the eleven reconciled exits made part of the price payable on post-acquisition results. Announced deal values are not comparable across transactions: they value different stakes and exclude different obligations. Following five funding rounds, these decisions show investors holding joint control through strategic vetoes. Platform rules, which no transaction between complementors could transfer, changed only through their owners, and access to two platforms was restricted by Turkish courts. Decision rights over the firms were therefore transferred through acquisition and investment terms, whereas authority over platform rules was held by others. The findings bear on merger-notification thresholds, which determine whether such rights are publicly recorded, the use of announced deal values in policy assessments, and industrial policies that subsidise operation on platform terms without altering them