The EU’s draft rules on monetisation are blunt, broad, and vague in places – what they are not is surprising. This is the inevitable end-point of a years-long tragedy of the commons
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When a draft of the European Commission’s Digital Fairness Act leaked earlier this week, some industry reactions had a distinctly end-of-days flavour. The official responses now winding their way out of trade bodies after the official draft of the act was released are only ratcheting down the tone a little; less apocalyptic, but nonetheless grim warnings of a terrible fate for European games companies, muttering darkly about the stripping of supposed freedoms from players, parents, and everyone else within a very wide radius.
We’ve all known that the European Union has been gearing up to regulate in-game monetisation for around a decade at this point, so I don’t know that “shock” is the right term for the reaction – but I do understand that there’s a hare-and-tortoise element to national and supranational regulation that often catches high-tech industries, like gaming, off-guard.
While high-tech companies move fast and break things, they often lose sight of the regulators many,
