The 2021 SaaS (service as a software) industry is worth an incredible $145 billion, with a projected user spending of $179 billion in 2022. Since Salesforce launched in 1999, the service as a software industry has been constantly evolving, improving, and progressing to increase production, save time, and simplify tasks. With more individuals than ever utilizing the internet for everyday tasks, the amount of independent SaaS developers and small businesses is also exponentially increasing. The result is a SaaS platform for everything, and that shouldn’t go unnoticed.
With heightened risk and climbing development costs, companies are urged to explore any additional cash flow, especially small to medium-sized businesses. For these companies, the R&D tax credit can be the difference between launching or closing. QREs (qualified research expenses) encompass the highest expenses in SaaS development, so if your company is already spending the money, you are entitled to benefit from this program. Developing a service as a software entails technical and financial risk, which the R&D tax credit can help relieve.
This is where the R&D tax credit really shines. SaaS is rife with technical and financial risk, which means that the work being done qualifies for the credit
This company had previously developed games in the console and PC markets but was beginning to expand into the research and development of a VR platform. Their VR effort intended to create an immersive, engaging experience beyond what customers had experienced while remaining much shorter than a traditional game. The development of these experiences started in conceptualization which included art, design, testing, and development of technical requirements.
After developing the concept, the team created prototypes and continued research on the constraints of a new environment and experience. For instance, one of the biggest challenges of a VR experience is the human component. In studies, developers noted that if experiences were too long, the lack of correlation between movement and vision would cause nausea and sickness in users. Testing was initiated to optimize the length of the features, and the company refined its focus to the development of a more immersive experience.
Building on the success of the prototypes, the company began focusing on the development of the actual VR experience, which included the development of the assets, physics, and visual elements. One of their main focuses was the development of an audio engine that would allow them to create immersive sound stages, which would provide a much more immersive environment. Like most development in the current landscape, this process was highly iterative. Because this was virgin territory, the team was constantly refining numerous parts of the experience, including an interaction between the player and the virtual environment, graphics optimization for improved latency and performance, development of acoustics, and testing and validation.
Qualifying activity was present throughout these development projects and through an agile development process that included multiple full development cycles (planning, design, requirements analysis, coding, and testing) the team was able to bring numerous experiences to the market and end-users.