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Steam And Netflix Prices Set To Rise 10% In Australia

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Australian Treasurer Joe Hockey has confirmed plans to charge a 10% tax on digital goods sold from outside the country will go ahead when he releases the new budget tomorrow. The tax will be part of the Goods and Services Tax (GST), a 10% tax applied to all purchases in Australia (which makes those purchases 10% more expensive). Hockey said he expects the tax to bring in $350 million AUD over the next four years. The new tax will apply to digital downloads purchased from overseas sellers, including video games, music, and movies.

Dubbed the “Netflix Tax” in commemoration of the recent launch of Netflix in Australia, the application of GST to digital goods has been talked about for a long time, but never implemented. The absence of the tax on digital goods up until now has made buying online things like video games much cheaper than buying them at retail, which has led to lobby groups arguing that local stores have been unfairly disadvantaged against international sellers because they have to charge 10% more for the same product. It will also level the playing field for Australian online retailers, which have also had to charge extra for the tax. Local TV and movie streaming services like Stan and Presto will now be on a level playing field with Netflix, which is based in the US.

“It is plainly unfair that a supplier of digital products in Australia has to charge GST and an off-shore supplier does not.” Hockey said, via the ABC. “What we’re doing is going to digital providers overseas and saying ‘can you apply the GST to the products you provide into Australia?’. They are agreeable to it. It’s not their profits [being taxed]. It’s a tax collected and they remit it back to the country where that occurs.

“When the GST legislation was originally drafted, it did not anticipate the massive growth in the supply of digital goods like movie downloads, games and e-books from overseas.”

It’s unlikely the tax will apply to all online sellers operating in Australia, however. Apparently, the changes will target 30 companies, and there have been no indications that the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) is equipped to make all online retailers that serve Australian customers charge for tax. So if you’re worried about Steam prices, you can rest assured. There are a myriad of online stores that resell Steam keys, and from what we know of the ATO, it’ll be a surprise if it even knows those stores exist.

Rhiannon likes video games and she likes writing, so she decided to combine them. As well as writing about video games, she also belts out the occasional science fiction or fantasy story, edits videos, and eats strawberry oreos. In that order.

Gaming

Ubisoft says that future Assassin’s Creed games will need more time to be made

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As Assassin’s Creed Shadows is about to sneak up on people in November, Ubisoft says that the time between developing games needs to be longer to find the “right balance.” Shadows has been in development for four years, longer than any other game in the series up to this point. That includes the huge open-world epics Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.

Shadows lead producer Karl Onnée (thanks, GamesIndustry.biz) says that the latest AC game took 25% longer to make than Valhalla. He says this is necessary to keep the quality of the series that it is known for: “It’s always a balance between time and costs, but the more time you have, the more you can iterate.” You can speed up a project by adding more people to it, but that doesn’t give you more time to make changes.

Onnée says this has as much to do with immersion and aesthetics as it does with fixing bugs and smoothing out pixels. This is because the development team needs time to learn about each new historical setting: “We are trying to make a game that is as real as possible.” We’re proud of it, and the process took a long time. In feudal Japan, building a house is very different from building a house in France or England in the Middle Ages. As an artist, you need to learn where to put things in a feudal Japanese home. For example, food might not belong there. Get all the information you need and learn it. That process takes a long time.”

You’ll have to wait a little longer for Ubisoft to work on each game. Are you okay with that? In what part of Shadows are you now? Is it interesting to you? Leave a comment below and let us know.

 

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You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP on PS5

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You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP, a remaster that Dragami Games and Capcom both created. You can now pre-order the PS5 game on the PS Store for $44.99 or £39.99. If you have PS Plus, you can get an extra 10% off the price.

The company put out a new trailer with about three minutes of gameplay to mark the start of the pre-order period. Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP is a remaster of Grasshopper Manufacture’s crazy action game from 2012. You play as Juliet, a high school student who fights off waves of zombies.

The remaster adds RePOP mode, an alternative mode that swaps out the blood and gore for fun visual effects. It also adds a bunch of other features and improvements that make the game better overall. You can expect the graphics and sound to be better as well.

The game will now come out on September 12, 2024, instead of September 12, 2024. Are you excited to get back to this? Please cheer us on in the section below.

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This Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 zombies trailer is way too expensive

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Is there really anyone who is following the story of Call of Duty’s zombie mode? We’ve known about the story in a vague way for a while, but we couldn’t tell you anything about it. It looks like the “Dark Aether” story will continue in Black Ops 6, but we don’t really know what that means.

For those of you who care, here is the official blurb with some background: “Requiem, led by the CIA, finally closed the last-dimensional portal, sending its inhabitants back to the nightmare world known as the Dark Aether, after two years of fighting zombie outbreaks around the world during the Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War timeline.”

Wait, there’s more! “Agent Samantha Maxis gave her life to seal this weird dimension from the inside out.” Even worse things were to come: senior staff members of Requiem were arrested without a reason by the Project Director, who turned out to be Edward Richtofen.

Black Ops 6 will take place about five years later, and it looks like it will show more about Richtofen’s goals and motivations. The most important thing is that you will probably be shooting an unimaginable number of zombies in the head. This week, on August 8, there will be a full reveal of the gameplay, so keep an eye out for that.

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