Gaming halls: the government counts its takings on 2,000 venues. The industry counts about fifty
11 November 2026, 22:20
Article 25 of the budget law for 2027, now before Parliament, taxes LAN halls for the first time: venues where customers pay by the hour to play online on computers and consoles, with no cash prizes. On top of a licence from the Customs and Monopolies Agency, costing two hundred euros for each gaming station and two thousand for each game on offer, operators will pay the entertainment tax: eight per cent of a turnover that the law sets for itself, fifteen thousand euros a year per station, which means twelve hundred to pay even when the chair stays empty. A deserted Tuesday evening, for the Treasury, yields as much as a full Saturday.
The revenue was worked out in the technical report, which says so openly: there is no complete data on how many halls exist. It assumes two hundred in 2027, with twenty stations each, bringing in €5.87 million; in 2028 the halls become 2,000, ten times as many in a single year, and the takings rise to €66 million. Iidea, the association of Italian video game companies, counts about fifty halls currently open. The government does not know how many venues there are, but it already knows how much each one will pay.
Those who run them do a different sum: if the rule passes as it stands, the operators warn, the halls will close or turn into pubs without computers, and the industry associations are asking for the article to be dropped. In the government's figures the venues multiply; in the figures of those who open them, they disappear.
Sixty-six million weighs little in a budget worth tens of billions, but the method, putting revenue in the budget before knowing whether it will arrive, is the same as for the big items. On 9 November the Court of Auditors, at a hearing before the Budget committees of the Chamber and the Senate, observed that the contributions demanded from banks, insurers and energy companies should bring in about €5.2 billion in 2027, but more than 2.3 of that is merely tax paid in advance.
The rest of the funding is money borrowed from the future. Of the new revenue for 2027, according to the Court, forty-five per cent consists of advances, payments collected now that will be missing later, and if the measures they fund are to be renewed they will leave "implicit costs for the following budgets". That bill will be paid by all taxpayers, including those who will never set foot in a gaming hall.
How many halls there are, the State will learn from the declarations that operators must send within sixty days; how much it will collect from each one, it has already written into the budget.
This article was prompted by a news item published in Open on 9 November 2026.