It doesn’t matter if it’s data, tariffs are meant to be protectionist so you could easily say that since Nintendo is headquartered in Japan or because the majority of their workers are in Japan or because their name sounds vaguely Japanese that all sales of their product in insert country here has to pay an additional 10% tax
Okay, but why are they charging $80 for a digital game, which tariffs don’t apply to?
I believe the tariffs do apply to digital goods as well depending where the server is.
Either way, the main reason would be because of digital was cheaper it would cannibalize physical sales.
How could it? It’s just data, no physical goods are being imported. Do tariffs apply to phone calls from other countries?
Don’t know, use internet these days, but in ye old days taxes sort of applied to long distance calls in a way so I’m unsure
It doesn’t matter if it’s data, tariffs are meant to be protectionist so you could easily say that since Nintendo is headquartered in Japan or because the majority of their workers are in Japan or because their name sounds vaguely Japanese that all sales of their product in insert country here has to pay an additional 10% tax
I don’t THINK that’s how tariffs work - I’m pretty sure it’s physical goods only - but I’m no expert, so I guess we’ll see.
They currently don’t affect digital goods but there is no actual reason they couldn’t make one that does we are in some truly interesting times