ABSTRACT
Tax Court has petitioners and the respondent, which is the Commissioner of the IRS then the United States, if the case gets escalated to the Supreme Court after appeal. Semantically speaking, there’s nothing wrong with dabbling in game making as a hobby. Independent creative work is hard, the media landscape keeps evolving, and living expenses continue to rise. Most game developers should be lucky enough to avoid needing a tax controversy expert, though it certainly couldn’t help to have one in their network. While making games independently for a living has gained more legitimacy in the mainstream, it’s still not seen as real actual work by a significant chunk of society. The judge in the Groetzinger case interpreted the law as “to be engaged in a trade or business, the taxpayer must be involved in the activity with continuity and regularity, and that the taxpayer’s primary purpose for engaging in the activity must be for income or profit.
