The governor of the state of New York, David Paterson, has announced that he plans to introduce new taxes aimed at creating revenue streams for the embattled budget. One of the newly introduced taxations will be aimed at video games, which will be tariffed more in this territorial division, if the state budget for 2009 is adopted in its current form.

The new state legislation and local sales taxes will be applied to all “digitally delivered entertainment services,” which include “prewritten software, digital audio, audio-visual and text files, digital photographs, games.” The exact amount by which taxations on video games will rise is not clear at the moment.

The proposal from the government stresses that it does not matter whether “a book, song, album, or movie would be subject to sales tax, no matter if it was bought at a brick-and-mortar store or downloaded online.” The new proposals, which have not been approved by the legislative, will also increase fees related to movie tickets, taxi rides, alcoholic beverages, and cable and satellite TV.

Governor David Paterson wrote in a statement that “This is where we are. Maybe we should have thought about this when we were depending on what we thought was inexhaustive collections of taxes from Wall Street – and now those taxes have fallen off a cliff.” The new fees that will be introduced will be coupled with a sharp reduction in spending in the state of New York, and there's still a bit of uncertainty regarding the finances of the government.

Most of the measures have been described to the middle class as taxing by advocacy groups and by Republican politicians, but no official position has emerged from the Entertainment Software Association, which represents the interests of video game publishers. Most gamers will also be outraged when they will find out that their digital distributed content will be imposed a tariff.