France's gigabyte tax could hit games by accident, and it's badly aimed

Is a 210 GB game download a luxury good? French lawmakers just voted as if it were. By the arithmetic of an amendment adopted on Friday, a GTA VI install, at its reported size, would carry about €11.55 of tax. The stated targets are streaming and cloud giants, not game publishers, and that is exactly the problem.

A thin, half-empty vote is not yet a law

On October 30, French deputies adopted a Socialist amendment to the 2027 budget by 11 votes to 10, against the government's advice. As Le Figaro reports, it makes data producers pay 5.5 euro cents for every gigabyte delivered to individuals in France, with internet providers reporting the volumes. The chamber was nearly empty, with around thirty deputies present.

The games angle comes from simple multiplication. Techaeris notes that Numerama calculates a reported 210 GB for GTA 6 would cost its publisher about €11.55 per French download. The tax would be paid by companies, not individuals, though they could pass the cost on to consumers. And it is far from law: it must survive the budget's revenue vote, the Senate and the negotiations between the two chambers.

A tax on bytes punishes the wrong thing

The stated target is the big streaming and cloud players. The deputies point to Google, Meta, Amazon, Netflix and Akamai as accounting for half of measured French traffic. But a levy on volume doesn't care who you are. It cares how heavy your product is, and modern games are among the heaviest products there are.

That is where we think the design collapses. File size is not profit, and it isn't even a good proxy for infrastructure cost. Techaeris points out that wholesale transit costs a fraction of a cent per gigabyte, so 5.5 cents is several times the cost of moving the data. This is not a charge for using the network. It is a toll on bigness, and a game with a huge map and high-resolution assets would, in our view, be billed like a 4K season of a series.

Compare that with the sums for video. An hour of 4K Netflix is up to 7 GB, about 40 cents, according to Techaeris. A 210 GB install is the equivalent of roughly 30 hours of that. A government that wanted to tax streaming profits has, in our view, built something that also taxes a hobby whose products are big by nature.

Digital-first publishers and players could pay the bill

Budget minister David Amiel, quoted by Le Figaro, argues that half the tax, about €5 billion on the Socialists' figures, would fall not on big tech but on smaller content providers, including French ones. We think games could be a clear example of that: a mid-sized studio selling only digitally may have little room to absorb the cost, and no way to shrink a 100 GB install by decree.

The amendment does include a cap of 15% of French revenue or 2% of global revenue. But as Techaeris says, that limits exposure for the largest platforms and does less for everyone else. And the precedent of the 2019 digital services tax, per both Techaeris and Le Figaro, is that the costs were at least partly passed down to sellers, advertisers and other providers. We would expect something similar here: higher prices, regional pricing quirks or fewer French-facing promotions, rather than a polite absorption by publishers. That is a forecast, not a fact.

The environmental argument, that charging per gigabyte pushes platforms toward better compression, is not absurd. Lighter installs would be a good thing. But we doubt a tax that costs players more buys a better patching system, and developers can't easily compress art their audience demands in 4K.

Players shouldn't panic, but publishers should pay attention

There is a real debate about how global platforms contribute to national budgets, and a byte-based levy has the merit, as its authors argue, of resting on a base that can't be relocated. This one is still the wrong tool. It penalizes size, it risks landing on smaller senders (the minister's own argument), and it treats games as collateral.

The vote was thin, the government is against it, and the Senate may well kill it. Players shouldn't panic about a €11.55 price tag that doesn't exist yet. But the industry should pay attention, because the arithmetic is now public: a giant install is a number anyone can multiply. If this tax dies, we suspect another byte-based idea will come. Publishers, trade bodies and platforms should argue now that games are not a byte-count.