As much as I would like the outcome, I doubt that this is meaningful use of tax-money in general.
I also wouldn't want taxes to be invested to preserve every oil-painting ever painted by someone, as it would inevitably create an industry that creates oil-paintings for the sole purpose of tax-benefits...
If we are going in the details, maybe tax credit should be over a small fraction of benefits for that game. You'd only get back a bit of what you paid.
The problem is that you can barely reach consensus that tax-money is spent on elderly homes and child-care, as the a critical mass of your taxpayers are not yet old and don't have children.
Once you try to establish that tax-payers money is being spent to preserve art, you inevitably cause a unsolvable political discussion on what art actually is.
At best, the budget will be drained uncontrollably with the system being abused by players gaming the system,
at worst the ruling political party will define what art is and only provide funding for the most boring forms of art.
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To be a bit constructive: Instead of a dedicated credit/payout, it would make more sense to establish a mandate in a region (i.e. US, EU) that public funding or tax-credits for ANY company can only be made on the premise that the output created by the company becomes partially owned by the public (and the citizens of this region), which requires it to provide value even without the company's involvement.
This would apply for any form of financial incentive given to company offices in a region, regardless whether it's hardware, software or services.
But I wouldn't hold my breath on that ever being properly mandated/executed...
> a world which prioritizes people being paid to create art! The horror...
You misunderstand. Creating art is hard. Putting oil paint on a canvas is easy. So if you pay money for paint on canvas without any other checks you will get the simplest passable form of paint on canvas. If you don't mandate that the whole canvas is covered all you will get is a pile of canvas with a single brush stroke.
Okay, I know this is just meant to be twitter-style bullying, but I'll bite:
As I wouldn't want every local governmental authority to freely define what constitutes "art", it means that everything can be categorized as art.
So the most economic and democratic solution then is to close the whole circle and reduce tax for everyone in return of submitting "art", even if it's just a picture of a milk-carton in a corner.
However, the consequence would be excessive governmental cost for the Ministry of Culture and Arts to preserve every piece of contributed art, so every citizen can see every art created by every other citizen.
This of course would have to be funded by tax-money, which unfortunately means increased tax-burden for everyone...
Result: A development put in motion which will definitely not end up prioritizing people being paid to create art!
I also wouldn't want taxes to be invested to preserve every oil-painting ever painted by someone, as it would inevitably create an industry that creates oil-paintings for the sole purpose of tax-benefits...