Taxes on Malaysian game developers

aishinono — Mon, 04 Mar 2019 04:43:01 +0800

Hi all,

I don't frequent this forum, so please forgive me ya.

So I'm making a platformer game, with a theme of which I'm sure nobody has done before. But that's not my question. My question is about income reduction, as in how much I'll actually be getting after all the taxes.

According to here, steam income will also be taxed. https://gamehubs.com/article.php?id=steam-t...at-does-it-mean

So it seems to be something like this:

Steam Cut = 30%
US Withholding Tax = 30%
Malaysian Online Services Tax = ?

This makes my income to be <= 40%

So if I sell a game at $10, I'll only get less than $4 for each copy sold. And this is assuming players buy the game. If the development budget is $4000, I'll need to sell 1000 copies just to almost break even, which is hard for an indie.

This is too little. 40% is barely able to pay off the wages of people working on the product. According to here, https://www.pcgamer.com/gdcs-realistic-talk...a-grim-picture/ , indies average at 2000 copies, but I am not confident my game can even reach that.

As for the US Withholding Tax, there is no going around it. If you go indie on Amazon, Smashwords or Steam, you will lose that 30%. Although it says 'withholding', which should've meant they're just keeping it for a while, it doesn't mean that at all. Once the US takes the 30% from you, unless you're a US citizen or registered in US, you will never get that 30% back. I have never been able to take back any amount from the stuff withheld from my book sales on Amazon.

So is there any Malaysian game dev, people in the know or just very smart people here? Is there a way that I can go around these income reductions? Perhaps there's a way to stop giving money to the US to prevent them from bombing brown people with my money?

I know I can just sell it on other platforms such as patreon, paypal or GOG, but GOG is extremely selective of indies and patreon and paypal don't have the market presence of Steam.

Also, please don't go politics, ya.

Lowyat.NET: Latest topics by aishinono

Taxes on Malaysian game developers