2025 was a year of legal disruption for the games industry | Year in Review

2025 felt like a year where legal stories dominated industry headlines nearly as much as the games themselves. Patent litigation over game mechanics, (unusually) public disputes over contested earn-out payments, and the busting open of the mobile ecosystem, to name a few.

These headlines aren’t just good stories though. The underlying issues have the potential to meaningfully reshape how games are made, monetised and played as we know it. Let’s look at some of these, and how they might evolve over the year ahead.

Good news and regulatory risks in mobile

Mobile developers have faced plenty of challenges over recent years, including IDFA, jurisdictional crackdowns and increased UA costs. One emerging bright spot on the horizon though is the evolution of the mobile ecosystem, largely driven by new European competition regulations and Epic’s lawsuits against Apple and Google.

In April 2025 the European Commission fined Apple €500m for failing to comply with the ‘anti-steering’ provisions of Europe’s Digital Markets Act. These are laws which require that developers should be able to inform customers, free of charge, of alternative offers outside app stores, steer them to those offers and allow them to make purchases. In October the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) declared both Apple and Google as having ‘strategic market status’, enabling the CMA to consider proportionate, targeted interventions to ensure that mobile platforms are open to effective competition (the CMA hasn’t taken any remedial action yet). Epic’s disputes with Apple and Google are more complicated and multi-faceted, with varying levels of success in different cases, and some aspects still being under appeal.

All of this will have several major implications for developers and players. Third party app stores will become more prevalent. This will permit players to access apps which might have been unavailable on traditional app stores for whatever reason (such as failing to comply with platform guidelines). This could be of particular appeal to certain subsects of the games industry, like web3 and blockchain businesses.

Developers, and in turn players, may see cost savings on in-app purchases (IAPs) due to new platform fee structures and alternative payment processors now being permitted. This is especially true if the recent Epic and Google settlements are approved by US courts, which could see platform fees on those platforms reduced to 9% or 20% depending on the transaction type.

We’ll also see the continued growth of web stores, which facilitate direct-to-consumer transactions like players buying in-game currencies from browser-based stores. These have existed for years, but their usefulness has been enhanced significantly due to changes around platform anti-steering restrictions.

With these new opportunities, though, comes increased compliance complexity. Many of these changes are likely to be region-locked to wherever the relevant laws and court decisions bite, resulting in a fragmented patchwork of disparate user experiences for players around the world.

The regulation of money, time and data

The European Union has had the video games sector set in its regulatory sights throughout 2025. BEUC’s report in September 2024 titled ‘Game Over’ was the first real sign of regulatory heat on monetisation, quickly followed by the outcome report on the Digital Fairness Fitness Check in October 2024 and the Consumer Protection Co-operation Networks ‘Key principles on in-game virtual currencies’ in March 2025.

All of these developments pose a threat to the free-to-play industry, paving the way towards the Digital Fairness Act. Could the way that games offer virtual currency be massively curbed? Banned for sale to children? Banned completely? These are all possibilities that are being posed and discussed right now.

What might constitute ‘transparent’ personalised data usage for monetisation is also coming into question too – whether it be personalised advertising, rankings, prices or recommendations. Right now, this is a topic primarily covered under existing data protection law, but the Fitness Check has opened the door to possible additional transparency and fairness requirements under consumer law too.

It’s not just monetisation under the microscope too – several European Parliament reports have also been looking at engagement practices that can be deployed across online interfaces, including games. The phrase ‘digital addiction’ has become increasingly common in EU policy circles, querying features more commonly seen in social media (like autoplaying videos) but also those more often seen in games (like daily rewards and activity streaks).

The impact assessment on digital fairness is due to land in Q2 2026, with a proposal for the legislation of the Digital Fairness Act coming in Q4 2026. It’s possible that there may be further industry and stakeholder engagement later in the year, so keep an eye on updates from your trade bodies and games policy groups like Flux Digital Policy.

Don’t think it’s just the EU playing in these waters too; the Brazilian Ministry of Justice has recently updated its video games age rating criteria to account for new parameters, including in-game purchases, pay-to-win mechanics and “algorithmic manipulation”. Next year, a committee part of the UK’s Department of Science, Innovation and Technology will also conduct an inquiry into the addictive use of technology and how it impacts children’s development.

Everybody thinks of the children

Online safety has grabbed headlines and Reddit threads this year, following the roll-out of several new pieces of legislation and many more in the works globally. Although keeping gamers safe and happy has long been a priority for games studios, adjusting and formalising practices in-line with specific legislation will continue to be a challenge going into 2026.

The majority of the UK’s Online Safety Act (OSA) came into force over the course of 2025 following extensive guidance from the regulator Ofcom, even extending to some short pointers for online gaming. Although initial enforcement of the OSA has focussed primarily on pornography and other serious harms, several games companies are currently engaged with Ofcom’s supervisory team and it is likely this programme will expand next year.

Under the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA), the protection of minors guidelines was published at the start of the summer, covering online safety measures for children (including recommendations around parental controls and account set-up information) as well as measures to counter other perceived consumer, privacy and security risks. This included specific restrictions for video games caught in scope, such as banning the sale of loot boxes to under 18s. Whether any of these restrictions will also carry over into the Digital Fairness Act (as not every video game will be caught by the DSA) remains to be seen.

A number of US State laws have started to appear in relation to age assurance measures, albeit currently more targeted at app store operators, operating systems and pornographic content providers. At the federal level, the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) has made its way back to the senate and includes “online video games” in its scope. If passed as-is, KOSA would put operators under a duty of care to mitigate harms to minors (such as eating disorder content, online harassment, sexual exploitation and financial harms).

And this is just the tip of the iceberg. Games studios operating in the multiplayer and/or user-generated content space need to be alive to the changing online safety landscape as we move into 2026. Other major countries that have or will soon have online safety laws include Australia, Singapore and Brazil.

AI receives gradual, begrudging tolerance

Generative AI tools have come a long way in a short period of time. This may be why a recent survey found that nearly 90% of developers are already using the tech in their game development workflows. Adoption is particularly high amongst AAA studios. Krafton even announced late 2025 that it was becoming an ‘AI-First’ company.

This is despite unresolved legal knots that slowed adoption through 2024. Are developers committing acts of infringement when using these tools? Are the outputs from these tools protectable by copyright? How are users and their data being kept safe with features like in-game chatbots?

The reality is that developers face the unenviable task of continuing to make increasingly high-quality games, faster, and cheaper in a world of rising costs and increased competition. Generative AI is seen as one way of squaring that circle, even if it carries various legal risks with it.

Players, however, at least those on PC and console, are not sold and remain largely critical. Many excellent games such as The Alters, Arc Raiders and Black Ops 7 have all faced public backlash. Mobile tells a different story though, where adoption has accelerated with less resistance. This may be because players of mobile games are generally less invested in how those games are made. Or maybe because, unlike Steam, mobile storefronts don’t require AI disclosure, making its presence harder to spot.

Some studios will undoubtedly continue to avoid the technology for a mixture of legal, ethical and creative reasons. For others though, the question will become less about if they should use the technology, but more about how they control the public messaging around disclosing its use.

What should developers do?

The legal landscape will continue to evolve in 2026, and the games industry will continue to attract more attention from regulators. Although legal developments often pose challenges for developers, they also present opportunities:

• Be prepared to proceed and adapt with different partners depending on where the mobile ecosystem moves to – flexibility and speed is key here as legal positions change across jurisdictions.
• Legislators and regulators are more aware of the sector than ever, which if left alone could result in unwieldy and unsuitable legislation for an industry as dynamic and varied as video games. More than ever, studios need to ensure that their voices are heard before laws and guidance are finalised.
• The court of public opinion can be just as important as any legal court. Whether you’re looking at a brand new online safety measure for your game or incorporating generative AI into your creative processes, decisions need to be made across team disciplines and considered from all perspectives.