I live in the UK, have full-time employment and in my spare time I’m I have been making a few small games. I plan on publishing these game to Google play, and iOS, for sale. And for larger game I’m working on currently I would also like to push this to Steam, PlayStation, and Nintendo DS (obviously based on approval).
My question is as I am already full-time employed, and I do this as a hobby I can’t register as self-employed as well can I?
Should I register a company name with companies House as my studio?
I have a splash screen at the beginning of all my games with my studio name on it, as most games do surely this needs to be a registered name somewhere?
Anyone know of any helpful guides for this kind of thing?
I had a PAYE job in the UK and was registered as self-employed at the same time, it was no problem, I just put PAYE income in right box on tax return and my elf-employed income in another part of the return.
Also note that in the UK in recent years, the government setup a new ‘trading allowance’ where you can earn £1000 per year without many HMCR registration & tax return hassles at all. This is a good option if tax your only reason for setting up as self-employed now, you can avoid that stuff until you are sure your income from games is going to be more substantial.
You can be employed and self-employed at the same time. I have been several times. The only issue might come if you lose your job. Being self-employed, even if not earning, might be an issue with benefits. Although you could just shut down the self-employment.
Generally all you need is to go the Sole Trader route, which just requires registering with HMRC and a business bank account. You might just about get away without the business bank account if not doing much. Note that most business bank accounts charge for just about everything, although you might get the first year free. Starling, is an app based business account that I believe is rare in not charging for transactions.
Registering as self-employed means doing a tax return each year, which is much simpler than it used to be. Things get more complicated if you become a limited company or register for VAT (you have to register for VAT over a threshold, I believe currently set at £85,000 turnover).