The Russian government has decided to help the domestic gaming industry

The Ministry of Digital Development has prepared a package of 88 measures that can help in the development of Russian IT. A separate block of measures is dedicated to the gaming industry.

According to the morning publication of Kommersant, among the measures:

• exemption of Russian IT companies from VAT on advertising services abroad;
• abolition of currency control for the IT sector;
• conducting intergovernmental negotiations to facilitate the access of Russian developers to the Chinese games market;
• introduction of VAT deduction when licensing applications by foreign users included in the register of domestic;
• creation of a Russian gaming store, in which the threshold for payments to holders of Western licenses will not be 30%, but 70%;
• reduction of social contributions to 7.6%;
• reduction of the income tax of Russian Internet services from advertising to 3%;
• reduction of the tax on online advertising for the largest foreign IT corporations, etc.

The package of measures must be agreed with various Russian regulators by November 13. On November 20, Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Chernyshenko instructed the ministry to give it to the government for consideration.

The Federal Tax Service has already supported the VAT deduction, but together with the Central Bank opposed the abolition of currency control.

A number of measures raise questions. For example, does the VAT deduction really “reset” the “Google tax”, as they say in other publications. The situation with the threshold of payments to copyright holders is also unclear. We will try to answer these questions together with experts today in a separate publication.

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• Is there any news?