This post was originally written in Italian by Paolo Gambardella. It has been translated by an AI agent and may contain inaccuracies.
Today a draft of the Digital Fairness Act leaked — the regulation the European Commission wants to use to rewrite online consumer protection. It was first published by the French outlet Contexte, then picked up by Euronews and AFP. I read about it on PocketGamer.biz. The official presentation is scheduled for 11 November.
What the draft says
For minors:
- paid loot boxes banned
- pay-to-win and pay-to-progress mechanics banned
- in-game currencies off by default, only enabled with parental consent
For everyone:
- the value of virtual currencies must be shown in real money
- loot box odds must be disclosed
- adults can disable features designed to push compulsive spending
Fines go up to 6% of global turnover. Some analyses also suggest that a PEGI rating under 18 is enough to indicate that minors are using the game. Worth bearing in mind that almost every mobile game today is PEGI 3, 7, or 12.
This is still a draft. It needs to go through Parliament and Council, and would apply twelve months after coming into force.
I won’t take a stance on whether it’s right or wrong — I trust the institutions and the research they’ve done. What interests me is what happens next, and here’s my read.
Without pay-to-win or pay-to-progress, free-to-play doesn’t work.
In F2P, the game itself is free. Access to the fun is free by definition, and rightly so — it’s how you get as many people in the door as possible. What players pay for is something else: winning, getting ahead, being the best. In every F2P I’ve worked on, without exception, spending was concentrated wherever there was something to win or somewhere to advance to.
The psychology backs this up neatly. According to self-determination theory, we play to satisfy three needs: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. F2P monetises all three: choosing a costume (skin), the feeling of being good at something, and comparing yourself to others — the leaderboard, the clan, the gaze of people below you. It’s even clearer through Bartle’s player types. The ones who spend are mostly Achievers, who want to progress, and Killers, who want to dominate or at least exert some kind of power over others. Take away pay-to-progress from the first group and pay-to-win from the second, and you’re left with a free game and very few paying customers.
What about Fortnite?
This is always the first objection: Fortnite makes billions selling only skins. But Fortnite launched at exactly the right moment and slotted into a business model — Epic’s — that would be unsustainable for any normal developer: a proprietary engine, a store, licensing deals, a global audience built over years.
And I’m not even sure it’s actually profitable. In March 2026, Epic laid off more than a thousand people, citing Fortnite’s decline and admitting it spends more than it earns. The same had already happened in 2023, with around 830 redundancies. If the cosmetics-only model is struggling there, imagine trying it at a fifteen-person studio.
The big players will manage. They make money in North America, Asia, and the Middle East, and can either adapt their European version or take the hit. For small and mid-sized European teams it’s a different story: the home market becomes the place where their business model, for a large chunk of the audience, is no longer legal.
That’s why, if I were talking to a small team today, I’d say one thing: you’re better off making a different kind of game.
Key takeaway
I don’t know what studios will do. Raise the PEGI rating, add age verification, ship a Europe-only version, pull out of the market altogether — I genuinely can’t predict it. What I do know is that a law like this, even if it changes along the way, reshapes the space you’re designing in. If you’re making F2P in Europe, it’s worth starting to think about this now, before the game is finished and the law is in force.
What’s your take? If you’re working on an F2P in Europe, what will you change? Feel free to message me directly on LinkedIn.