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In This Edition
- The impact of online safety laws
- Newzoo’s latest stats
- The Game Business Show comes to London
Hello there! Welcome back. I’ve missed you. Is that a new haircut?
In this week’s edition of The Game Business, we tackle the legislation that is forcing developers to introduce age verification and other measures into its games. And to help us navigate all that, we’ve enlisted the help of media, tech and IP legal veteran Isabel Davies (currently plying her trade at Wiggin), who joins us as this week’s Guest Host.
Davies and I also chat about ‘dark patterns’, Capcom’s console concerns, the blockbuster success of Hollow Knight: Silksong, and a whole lot more. Including the news that we are doing another live show, this time in London.
You can watch and listen to the entire thing above. Or alternatively, I’ve picked a few key takeaways below. Enjoy.
P.S. If you’re reading this before the weekend, we are still looking for reader feedback in our TGB Reader Survey! It’ll only take a moment.
Online safety laws causing studios to rethink online game modes
Video game developers are reconsidering in-game features as a result of new online safety laws, according to a top law firm.
In this week’s edition of The Game Business Show, Wiggin senior associate Isabel Davies talks about the impact of the UK’s Online Safety Act which is designed to protect users, particularly children, from online harms.
These include ‘illegal harms’, which are things like terrorism, child sex abuse material and so on. And legal harms, things like pornography, which are deemed harmful to children.
The way this impacts the video game industry is that any product or service that enables user-to-user interaction (so that includes chat services or sharing user-generated content) falls under this legislation.
Therefore, game companies that allow for user interaction must complete a risk assessment for their games or services, and then carry out any necessary safety duties.
“The thing that catches people off guard, is that there is no real exemption for [small companies] in this act,” Davies said on the Show. “The regulatory burden is the same if you’re one of the biggest platforms on the planet, or you’re a tiny studio starting up. If you’re a user-to-user service, you have to do this risk assessment and then complete your safety duties. It will get easier in time. The compliance burden will lessen. Practice will develop. It will get better. But no doubt, this summer has been difficult for some.”
“The regulatory burden is the same if you’re one of the biggest platforms on the planet, or you’re a tiny studio starting up”
It’s not entirely clear what these laws could end up costing studios. But teams looking at financing ought to include some legal costs in their budgets, Davies said.
“This isn’t necessarily a cheap thing to comply with when you’re starting out,” she admitted. “It depends how you’re doing your risk assessment, whether you’re getting advisors in, or how sophisticated your user-to-user process is. [There is a] digital tool to help you do your risk assessments. That’s usually one thing I flag first. You might find you can do a comprehensive first stab at a risk assessment.
“I get companies saying, should I have some legal budget for GDPR? And I say ‘yes, and you will want one for OSA, too’. If you’re talking to investors about raising money for your game, you need to think about online safety as much as you are consumer protection or GDPR.”
Some places, including Steam, Xbox and Roblox, have introduced age verification into their services around certain content and features. But Davies said that just because you have a chat function or user-generation content, doesn’t mean you have to age gate them.
“There will be situations where age assurance is a hard requirement under the OSA. But there are other situations when it might be recommended, and you might think there are other ways you can protect users,” she said. “A lot of the content that is harmful for children is a lot of stuff that game companies don’t want on their service, like pornography, or things that promotes, educates or glamorises suicide, self-injury or eating disorders. Most game companies don’t want that on their service.”
She added: “If your risk assessment says that your services are at high risk of grooming, for instance… Maybe you’ve had instances of it, or near misses, or law enforcement has been in touch about it. And then maybe it’s a case of needing to identify the kids and pull them off.
“But there are other ways around it. Don’t encourage people to make friends with people they don’t know. So don’t say ‘you just played with these five people, why not add them as friends?” Or don’t allow people to message other users if they’re not already friends. You cut off the opportunities where a bad actor could approach a kid.”
The laws are causing some developers to rethink the features they’re including in their games, Davies said. The law firm has spoken with studios that were considering user-to-user modes, and are now questioning whether it is worth the investment.
“I’ve spoken to some already [that are doing that],” Davies told us. “Or, they’ve gone ‘we will do it, but maybe not at launch’. A good example will be… let’s get the core game monetisation loop working, let’s make sure the gameplay is good. And only then invest in clan functionality or chat functionality etcetera.
“But some games have got it in their head that the community and social aspect is so core to the game, it’s kind-of unavoidable. Some games have been built on that basis.”
Despite the concerns, Davis goes to great lengths to reassure teams around the measures and says that many studios are doing a “lot of great stuff already.”
“For a lot of the game studios we’ve been advising, we get to the end of the risk assessment, and you go ‘oh actually, there’s a lot of great stuff we do already. We just need to document what we’ve got. Or maybe we need to think more about how our players interact.’ But, actually, a lot of folks do a lot of good stuff already, so hopefully it’s not too big of a step change.”
Although the UK is the focus of the current rules, there is similar legislation taking place in Australia and the European Union. The EU is working on its Digital Services Act, which is currently stricter than the UK’s Online Safety Act. There are also early signs of online safety measures being introduced around pornography in the US.
“Online safety is not going away anytime soon,” Davies said.
You can check out our full interview above, which also discusses age verification techniques, using third-party services such as Discord, and the approach of UK Online Safety regulator OFCOM.
Newzoo: Video game industry will lag behind inflation again in 2025
Games data firm Newzoo predicts the video game sector will generate $188.8 billion in 2025, a rise of 3.4% over the year before.
However, this is below the expected global inflation rate of 4.2% (IMF estimates), which means another year of decline in real terms for the video game industry.
The figures do vary by category. The biggest revenue growth area in 2025 is from the console sector, which Newzoo says will deliver $45.9 billion, up 5.5% over the year before. This is due to a number of higher priced items, including big AAA titles (such as Assassin’s Creed Shadows, Mario Kart World and Monster Hunter Wilds), and the launch of the Nintendo Switch 2. In terms of users, the console market is expected to grow 2.5% to 645 million players, which is well below the PC and mobile sectors.
The PC market will see revenue growth of just 2.5% to $39.9 billion, Newzoo says. This modest number is partially due to the success of games like Helldivers 2 and Palworld the year before. In terms of audience, Newzoo predicts there will be 936 million PC players this year, a rise of 3.1% year-on-year.
As for mobile, Newzoo expects revenue growth of 2.9% to $103 billion, and audience growth of 4.5% (three billion players). 2025 was a significant year for direct-to-consumer opportunities for mobile developers, after Apple was forced to further open up its App Store in certain markets. Therefore, it’s expected studios will see a greater share of that revenue this year.
The Game Business Show (with Peter Moore) head to London
A new Investment Summit will take place on Friday, October 24 in London, and The Game Business Show will be there.
The Summit is free for industry people to attend (you can apply for a pass through here) and the keynote session is with video game legend Peter Moore (Sega, Xbox, EA, Liverpool FC, etcetera). Moore will be speaking with me on stage about his epic career. So you can come along, meet Peter and The Game Business. What a treat.
The free pass also covers the other industry sessions going on that day, including an investment panel featuring Team17, Yogscast and Transcend Fund hosted by GamesIndustry.biz. Plus, you will have complete access to MCM Comic-Con, which takes place the same day.
Meanwhile….
Capcom has expressed concerns about the price of the PlayStation 5. In an interview with Nikkei Games, Capcom president Haruhiro Tsujimoto said that when factoring in hardware cost, subscription cost and software… PS5 consumers are looking at spending over $670 in Japan at the point of purchase. He said: "This is not an amount that can be easily reached, especially for younger generations. This situation is not limited to Japan, but is similar overseas as well."
Hollow Knight: Silksong has got off to a strong start, having already broken the digital stores of Nintendo, Xbox, PlayStation and Steam at launch. The game peaked at over 535,213 unique players on Steam. Data companies estimate the game has sold between four and five million units since launch.
There’s a whole host of stories coming out of the Roblox Developers Conference. The firm revealed a number of new AI tools, including one where creators can use text prompts to create ‘fully interactive scripted assets’. It also showed a TikTok-style Moments feed, where users can capture and edit short clips from games and share them. Roblox hopes this will improve discoverability. The company has also increased the reward it pays to creators. Now 100,000 Robux equals $380, a rise of 8.5%.
New data from the ESA shows how video game players are getting older. 29% of video game players in the US are now over 50, the trade body says. That’s more than under 18s (23%), 18 – 34 year-olds (28%) and 35 – 49 year-olds (20%). In 1999, just 9% of US gamers were over 50.
BAFTA is hosting a video game concert at the Royal Festival Hall in London on January 31, 2026. BAFTA Games In Concert will feature scores from games such as Baldur’s Gate 3, Assassin’s Creed, Everybody’s Gone To the Rapture and Tomb Raider: Legend. The event will feature the BBC Concert Orchestra under the direction of composer Austin Wintory.
2K has cut staff at Civilisation and XCOM developer Firaxis. The strategy game specialist has had a tough couple of launches. The excellent 2022 game Marvel’s Midnight Suns performed below expectations. Meanwhile, this year’s Civilization VII has had a mixed reception from fans and a slower-than-expected start commercially.
Dead Island 2 has seen 20 million players since its launch in 2023. The Deep Silver game has found a larger audience via subscription services, including PlayStation Plus Extra, and Xbox and PC Game Pass.
Amazon has greenlit a live-action adaptation of Life Is Strange, which will air on Prime Video. The series will be written by Charlie Covell.
That’s it for this week. We will be back with more features, news, interviews and analysis next week. Thank you for reading.
