Only few days left before the Malaysian government imposed the new 6% tax on digital services that are provided by foreign companies. However, plenty of these companies have yet to publicly revealed the impact of the tax on their services while for some, it is only stated deep inside their documentation.
One such example is Valve’s highly popular digital distribution service for PC games, Steam. According to the Tax FAQ section of the Steamworks Documentation, the Malaysian digital tax will be included directly in the game prices:
As noted above, Steam will begin to collect the tax starting from 1 January 2020 onwards as per the directive from the government. Inside the same FAQ, Valve pointed out that it would remit the tax to the authorities on a periodic basis.
However, it is not clear whether the implementation of the new digital tax would increase the game prices in Steam for Malaysian users. Then again, we do advise gamers out there to brace for the impact, given the fact that Steam is one of the services that were highlighted by RTM during its broadcast of Belanjawan 2019 in November 2018.
We’ve reached out to Valve in order to obtain further clarification. So, stay tuned as we’ll keep you updated once we’ve received a response.
(Source: Steamworks.)
