Interesting read. But you can't consider sales tax "revenue" or "cost". Neither you nor Valve pays the revenue tax, the customer does. I always thought you enter the amount of $ and Valve adds the tax. Would make much more sense if sales tax is excluded everywhere. But I guess that would be confusing for customers. But AFAIK Microsoft does it this way, at least in the US.
(I just include it because it shows up in the gross 'total revenue' dashboards in Steam's back end. But I agree that it was never your revenue in the first place.)
Actually, there's "cost" that may be attributed to the taxes depending on the country. For example, Canada has variation in its on-sale taxes depending on the province, but its Tax Exchange agreement flat it out at 15% for any source outside of Canada. The best example is with the Province of Alberta which has a on-sale tax of only 5%. Customers who buy from Alberta will pay a 5% tax on their purchase, but Steam has to obligation of paying 15% to Canada as a withholding tax. Where do you think that the 10% difference will come from?
Interesting read. But you can't consider sales tax "revenue" or "cost". Neither you nor Valve pays the revenue tax, the customer does. I always thought you enter the amount of $ and Valve adds the tax. Would make much more sense if sales tax is excluded everywhere. But I guess that would be confusing for customers. But AFAIK Microsoft does it this way, at least in the US.
(I just include it because it shows up in the gross 'total revenue' dashboards in Steam's back end. But I agree that it was never your revenue in the first place.)
Actually, there's "cost" that may be attributed to the taxes depending on the country. For example, Canada has variation in its on-sale taxes depending on the province, but its Tax Exchange agreement flat it out at 15% for any source outside of Canada. The best example is with the Province of Alberta which has a on-sale tax of only 5%. Customers who buy from Alberta will pay a 5% tax on their purchase, but Steam has to obligation of paying 15% to Canada as a withholding tax. Where do you think that the 10% difference will come from?