Govt Has Played A ‘Game Over KO’ To Online Gaming Firms With 28% Tax
ABP NewsLook at the spectacle we have here. The government, in an Armageddon move that no one saw coming, has decided to slap a gigantic 28% GST on the “full deposit value” of online gaming. EXPLAINED: Impact Of New GST Rules On Cinema Halls, Automobile Sector, Online Gaming You Can’t Squeeze Water From Stone While everyone was thinking that the game was about to level up, especially when Prime Minister Narendra Modi was cheerleading the gaming industry on multiple occasions by having championed the same and was expecting India to be the leader. India currently has only 1% market share in the gaming industry, whereas the US and China have 23% and 26% market share, respectively, and while India was galloping with over 8bn downloads globally, disaster seems to have struck and it appears like someone has hit the “pause” button. While the gaming industry was expecting some power-ups in the form of reformative tax reforms, now it seems they would be bargaining for a mercy plea to impose 28% tax on the GGR/Platform Fee, failing which the survival of the online gaming industry would be doubtful.