Go easy on them, they're a small upstart!
Rockstar North

TaxWatch, a UK-based "investigative think tank," just published a report that accuses Rockstar Games of dodging corporate taxes while also taking advantage of millions of pounds worth of tax credits. That is to say, TaxWatch says that Rockstar finagled their profits in a way that keeps its UK-based studios reporting very small figures in order to keep claiming those tax credits, while simultaneously reporting higher than normal profits for the US-based locations.

It's kind of like what happens with a ton of Hollywood films. There are ways to make it so that despite however many hundreds of millions of dollars a movie makes, they aren't actually "making" that amount. In a lot of cases, those big movies will often just "break even" on costs thanks to some financial and accounting tricks. You'll see this pop up more often when a film's actors opt to get a cut of a film's revenues and then complain when the big movie they were in doesn't pay out because of these accounting tricks. And while it is certainly scummy as all hell and happens to straddle the line between legal and illegal, these financial adjustments to "break even" are still ultimately legal when all is said and done.

Going back to Rockstar's case, TaxWatch says that Rockstar's operating profit between 2013 and 2018 was around $5 billion. However, during that same stretch of time, Take-Two and Rockstar's UK based studios reported around $57.8 million in profit before taxes. Even more, Rockstar has apparently paid no corporation tax in the UK over the past decade and instead claimed ~$51.3 million in tax credits through Rockstar North between 2015 and 2017.

"Rather than a picture of success, the accounts of the developers of the game, Rockstar North, show that the company has earned so little that they have been eligible to claim tax credits from the government," says the report.
This raises another concern about whether or not the tax credits are being fairly distributed in this and other cases. The tax credit was initially set up to provide relief to studios that were creating games that are "culturally British" from small and medium sized businesses. Even though Grand Theft Auto V is very much an "American" game based on American locations and culture, they still pass the tax program's "culturally British" requirement because it was mainly developed by Rockstar North.

To date, Rockstar has allegedly claimed around 19% of the total tax credits distributed under the tax fund.

"The large amounts of subsidy that Rockstar North has been able to claim from the UK government demonstrates that the Video Games Tax Credit system is not working as intended."