Origins ( EA Games ) Taxation of online purchase games & expansions

[DaveLembke]

I became part of Origin when buying Dragon Age Inquisition at the local Walmart and registering online to play the game. I saw black friday deals they have and saw The Descent expansion for $9.99 regularly $14.99. So I figured why not I will but this expansion for $10 USD. Started to go through the motions to buy the game and saw it totaled to $10.79, they added a 80 cent tax on the game. Now I live in New Hampshire were there is no sales tax unless your buying food at a restaurant. All other online purchase everywhere else you dont pay tax. I bought over 80 games through Steam and NO TAX... This is so insane that they are Taxing Online Purchases when I dont even live in the same state that they function from. I can see there being rules if you live in the same state that the company resides it being taxation for a same state individual because otherwise people would use that as a loophole to sell online and undercut the competition with a NO TAX advantage.

I was going to buy this expansion for $10 for a 33% savings, but because they are taxing and it to me is wrong, I am not going to buy the expansion or any other games through them. Its unfortunate that some titles are EA Games only and unavailable at Steam, but I am just going to buy the game physically through a vendor that doesnt charge tax or not buy it at all. The Dragon Age Inquisition game I bought Walmart didnt charge me $1.60 in Tax for for the $20 purchase, so why charge 80 cents on this $10 expansion. 

Heard many people complain about EA Games. I never had a reason to complain about them until now. Its stupid that they are operating with online purchase taxation. They just lost $10 from me because of this and from what I read online I guess people have been complaining about this for a few years. 

They should really advertise it for whatever the taxed cost is instead of hoping someone that is click happy will click pay and not notice the tax. I almost clicked to pay but backed out when I saw this TAX. 

I was also going to buy Witcher 3 but backed out of that too since I feel this is wrong.



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[DaveLembke]

Origin lost out on $29.99 + the $9.99 expansion that I refused to buy through their taxed system...

Found Witcher 3 GOTY Edition at Steam for same listed price tag of $29.99, but not having to pay $32.39 with $2.40 SALES TAX at Origin

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[DaveLembke]

WOW almost a 52GB installation for Witcher 3 ... Looks like I need to free up some space with less than 8GB free. 

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[BC_Programmer]

EA has a Office in Warwick, which means they have a Tax Nexus in Rhode Island and thus have to pay (and charge) State Tax as an Internet Retailer. Digital Content isn't a tax excluded item according to RI Tax Code 44-18-30.

Valve doesn't seem to have any Rhode Island Office, and as a result they do not have Tax Nexus and thus do not have to pay State Tax when selling to RI residents.

Interestingly, it seems that things are reversed for Washington, Valve has offices there and EA Origin doesn't, so Steam charges Sales tax and Origin does not.

[DaveLembke]

Interesting. I didnt dig this deep into it. Strange about the reversal between Steam Valve and Origin for Washington residents, however you cant have double taxation so I suppose thats why.

[BC_Programmer]

Speaking of Witcher 3, do you meet the minimum requirements?

CPU:    Intel CPU Core i5-2500K 3.3GHz / AMD CPU Phenom II X4 940
RAM:    6 GB
OS:    64-bit Windows 7 or later
Video Card:    Nvidia GPU GeForce GTX 660 / AMD GPU Radeon HD 7870

A 660 is far more powerful than a 720, if I understand their naming scheme.

[DaveLembke]

Yes I have a FX-8350 8-core 4Ghz CPU system and got a great deal on a used GTX 780 ti for $100 when my youngest brother upgraded to the GTX 980 ti. He also gave me 8GB of DDR3 1600Mhz with it for the $100. So it now has 16GB DDR3 1600Mhz running Windows 7 64-bit.

I only run this system when it calls for games or processing that requires that much processing power. Prior to the upgrade to this video card when all 8 cores were at 100% it was pulling 465 watts. So I tend to run my older Athlon II x4 620 2.6Ghz system more that pulls just 175 watts to avoid wasting money to electric company. When i am just going to program or surf the web without gaming I will run my Sempron 3850 1.3Ghz APU quadcore that draws just 43 watts combined between flat screen and the system. A few years ago the local power company made me mad by doubling the rates and since then I have made it a habit to be power conservative vs running the 8-core system as one and only system that can do all and throwing money out the door to power company monopoly. Surprisingly the Sempron 3850 APU quadcore is able to do some lightweight gaming too such as playing Hearthstone fairly well. I have run World of Warcraft on it as well but frame rates were not impressive as is to be expected given the lightweight APU.

Here is some gaming testing i did with crippling the clock and cores not too long ago. http://www.computerhope.com/forum/index.php/topic,157291.0.html

Even though I know the Athlon II x4 620 2.6Ghz is below the minimum requirements for Witcher 3, I am going to test how it plays the game if it even can with the GT 730 video card. My guess is it will run horrible, but will see vs assume. Dragon Age Iquisition for example calls for a Quadcore minimum system 2.0Ghz for Intel and 2.5Ghz for AMD and I was able to run it ok on a Pentium E5400 2.7Ghz for example but both cores were pegged at 98-100% while Dragon Age Inquisition was running. Video card with that system test on the E5400 Pentium was a GeForce 9800GT 1GB. Only issue with the E5400 was that when there was a surge of processing required sometimes the screen would freeze for a second and audio would loop and then it would unfreeze. I ran memtest86 for 5 hours thinking maybe I detected a memory issue stressing it, but no RAM errors detected. It just came down to that the game was running the system too hard.