The EU’s proposed KIDS Act could burden developers, restrict adult players and push older games off the market—all in the name of "child safety".
Protecting children is an easy promise to sell. Explaining why a small developer might need to overhaul an offline game to keep selling it in Europe is considerably harder. The proposed EU KIDS Act deserves scrutiny for precisely that gap between its reassuring purpose and its potential consequences.
Presented by the European Commission on September 17, the proposal remains subject to negotiations and approval by Parliament and Council. It is not law yet. But its broad approach risks making games more expensive to maintain, more restrictive to access, and less attractive to keep on sale.
Buying a Game Online Should Not Make It a Social Network
The problem starts with what counts as an online game. The proposal’s definition and accompanying explanation extend to games distributed online even when they run locally. Its physical-media exclusion is narrow. An offline single-player game does not necessarily escape the framework simply because it has no multiplayer.
That is an extraordinary starting point for legislation addressing online risks. Downloading a puzzle game does not give it strangers, private messages or predatory chat rooms. Although individual obligations differ, the framework reaches products with fundamentally different safety concerns.
Article 15 would require safeguards against compulsive or excessive play, safer settings and contacts, and parental tools. Children under 13 would need access enabled and controlled through those tools. Developers would inherit responsibilities that reach well beyond displaying an age rating.
Adults Could Get the Restrictions Too
Article 8 makes the safety requirements the default, permitting departures after adulthood is established through age assurance. Rules presented as protections for children can therefore shape everyone’s experience.
Games lawyer Isabel Davies warns that daily logins, activity streaks and other time-based mechanics are threatened by the proposal. Developers could remove affected features for all European players or preserve them for adults using appropriate age checks.
Games that punish children for missing a day deserve criticism. But lawmakers need to distinguish coercive design from ordinary incentives to return. Leaving developers uncertain about that boundary encourages defensive cuts, including to features adults willingly enjoy.
The Commission promises privacy-preserving verification, so claims that everyone must hand a passport to a publisher overstate the proposal. Nevertheless, a privacy-conscious gate remains a gate. Failed checks and additional setup can still prevent legitimate customers from accessing what they want to play.
The Cheapest Compliance Strategy Could Be Removing the Game
Latham & Watkins identifies no general exemption for small and medium-sized businesses. That matters enormously. A major publisher can distribute compliance costs across millions of players. An independent developer with one modestly successful release cannot.
For an older game with dwindling sales, rebuilding systems or obtaining legal advice could cost more than keeping it available earns. Withdrawal could become the cheaper option. The proposal does not order those delistings; it risks creating the commercial incentive for them.
“Child safety” must not become a political shield against examining those consequences. Genuine protection requires rules proportionate to actual risks, clear treatment of offline games, and workable obligations for smaller developers and older releases.
A game does not need to be declared illegal to disappear. Making it uneconomical to sell can achieve the same result. Europe should fix that risk before asking players to accept it as the price of protecting children.