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Part of it has to do with corruption. There was a time when I was trying to run an actual journalistic quality blog about gamedev, and I interviewed a bunch of people, some of them almost slipped out stuff, and one talked to me off the record, basically he claimed a certain Brazillian company that has a license from a certain japanese company to manufacture some 8-bit and 16-bit consoles, lobbyed very hard for the tax increases on imported consoles (something that didn't helped them, most of their income come from Karaoke machines now). And later on I found out that a lot of employees of that certain brazillian company have connections with the government, for example one of them worked for that company and worked for BNDS, and while still in both of their payrolls went on a speaking tour to explain how the government was being great for the local game industry by offering loans at low cost for game companies... when I went to check, the game companies or had government friends, or family (for example one of the "game companies" the government helped, that never made a game, had the son of the president as shareholder). I also once foolishly helped an "activist" that was promising to represent Brazillian gamers to lower the taxes, I even printed the logo of his campaign on my own company t-shirts and promo materials, and printed his logo on an Arcade machine I built. After he got inside the government and the negotiations started, then he immediately proposed a tax cut only for physical stores, and massive tax increases for online stores, specially Steam, this made people investigate his life, and then find out he was shareholder of physical game stores... Thankfully his effort failed (thankfully because what he was proposing would make overall taxes higher instead of lower, also it would result in censorship of a bunch of stuff). |