The 12,000 AWP machines in Berlin face an increase in tax on their cashbox returns of eight per cent, moving up to 20 per cent from the current level of 12 per cent, a meeting of the German trade association was told in Berlin on Wednesday.
It is anticipated that many of the other 15 ‘Lander’ or regions within Germany will now follow suit - except for Bavaria, which does not levy a tax at all on AWP cashboxes.
The tax hike is probably a direct result of bad publicity for the industry in the German capital; one newspaper recently reported that the incidence of gaming machines in the city has doubled in four years from 6,000. Berlin has around 200 arcades where most of the machines are located.
At the same time, the meeting discussed plans by the German Federal Government to adjust its gaming machine regulations to bring back the pre-2005 law that gaming machines should be scrapped after a four-year life. In the present-day context of a predominantly multigame video-based machine industry, this will be interpreted as scrapping the game software of a multigame machine where the software is over four years old, rather than the hardware itself. This is at present a discussion document within the German industry, and would be unlikely to be applied for four years in order to permit current software to be used fully. Germany moves to a new ‘4.1 specification’ for its machine technology next year and it is thought that this four-year lifespan move is a bid to keep the industry under greater control.
