EU Digital Fairness Act: Europe is Pulling a China!

In regards to today’s EU regulation draft of Digital Fairness Act, I think people here completely forgot the headlines of what happened in a similar situation in China just 2 years ago. You remember how it ended there? 😅

It was a sweeping regulation, where among the most impactful proposed rules were bans on rewards for daily logins, first-time purchases, or repeated spending, limits on how much users can recharge in a game, and mandatory warnings against “irrational consumption behavior”.

The biggest hammer 🔨 was the proposal to prohibit offering probability-based “lucky draw” features (yeah, this means exactly what you think, loot boxes, gachas, etc).

It also required that games provide players the option to directly purchase an item comparable to what might be obtained via a random draw, so that a player need not rely entirely on chance mechanics, which single handedly destroys progression engines of 95% of Asian RPGs on the market and I am talking the big names 🤑.

So what actually happened? 𝐍𝐎𝐓𝐇𝐈𝐍𝐆, as just the value destruction on the stock market and the thought of their biggest national company going down the drain meant that even Chinese government actually backed down, and fired the head regulator responsible for this draft and also hastily approved 105 new games to appease the markets.

Remember this next time, when you will again hear us talking how Chinese developers are completely devouring the global games market on the two & a half gamers podcast, while in the meantime we shoot ourselves into the foot here 🥴…