Digital Games Industry and Game Developers in Turkey: Problems and Possibilities

This study aims to understand the games industry’s problems in Turkey and the relation of those problems with game developers, their working practices and the ecosystem. Adopting an ethnographic approach, in-depth interviews were conducted with 20 game developers, who work in digital games industry, mostly in one of the most important creative clustering examples in Turkey, METU Teknokent. According to the findings of the field research, main problems are defined as the lack of know-how and human capital. It is understood that those problems aggravate adverse working conditions for game developers by causing working without getting paid or underpaid and the self-teaching process that generates excessive working hours. In this regard, the potentiality of creating a culture in the game ecosystem based on solidarity, collective learning and sharing information is argued to improve Turkey’s games industry and game developers’ working conditions