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How Game Makers Like EA Mine for Tax Breaks

Posted by timothy on from the gold-farming-in-real-life dept.

Sometimes it seems like the U.S. government's relationship to commercial video games is mostly adversarial, as when public officials vilify or move to censor games (even when the results are mixed). An anonymous reader writes with a reminder that the business side of the games business has a much cozier government link, as reflected in this excerpt from the New York Times: "Because video game makers straddle the lines between software development, the entertainment industry and online retailing, they can combine tax breaks in ways that companies like Netflix and Adobe cannot. Video game developers receive such a rich assortment of incentives that even oil companies have questioned why the government should subsidize such a mature and profitable industry whose main contribution is to create amusing and sometimes antisocial entertainment." Since filling out even a simple return can be rather game-like, maybe they're just doing what they do best.

1 of 123 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Why the government should subsidize? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Flamebait

    Why is it that corporations get tax breaks at all?

    Why is it that the ultra-rich, mostly Republicans, get to shuffle their income through loopholes like calling it "capital gains" (taxed at a mere 15%) while the middle class get robbed blind by the tax code?

    We should fix the tax code, that's no question. But the "fixes" supported by the Republicans are more Robber Baron style "crony capitalism", nothing more.

    Oooh brother, you are CLUE-LESS.

    Ultra-rich like George Soros, Warren Buffet, Steven Spielberg?

    In fact, there's a pattern to supporting DEMOCRATS - those with nothing to lose from poor decisions. The really poor - who live by handout, and the really rich, who have so much money they live on another planet.

    Republican support is strongest among those that have enough money that the government tries to take it from them, but not so much they can afford poor decisions.

    It'd be really nice to elminate all tax withholding and all corporate taxes - make INDIVIDUALS have to perform the act of actually giving their money that they've already earned to the government.

    Then we'd see how much support "big government" REALLY has. Instead of never seeing how much government costs, you'd have to actually PAY for it.

    And if you're against that? Riddle me this, Batman: WHY DO YOU WANT TO HIDE THE COST OF GOVERNMENT?