The argument about live-service monetisation has been running inside gaming for a decade without resolving anything. It is now leaving the argument stage. The European Commission announced a Digital Fairness Act on 12 May 2026 targeting addictive design patterns, and in July it issued preliminary findings against Meta over infinite scroll and autoplay. Games are not the first target, but the design vocabulary being scrutinised is the same one PlayStation storefronts use daily. If you want to see where that ends, look at a sector that has already been through it: in Lithuania, Twinsbet slot games are legally barred from offering a demo mode, a progressive jackpot or a single free spin.
Not restricted. Banned. A licensed operator like to Twinsbet also has to verify identity before first play rather than at withdrawal, keep the minimum age at 21, and force players to set deposit and session-time limits before they start. Loosening a limit takes 48 hours to apply. Tightening it is immediate. That is what a mature regulatory answer to engagement design looks like, and none of it was voluntary.
The mechanics overlap more than the industry admits
Console gaming and regulated gambling are different products with different intents, and conflating them is lazy. But the retention toolkit is shared: variable-reward loops, streak mechanics, limited-time offers, currency abstraction that puts distance between a purchase and its cash value, and progress systems designed to make stopping feel like loss.
Regulators do not evaluate intent. They evaluate mechanism and outcome. That is the exposure.
Belgium and the Netherlands already did this
Loot boxes were the first test. Belgium ruled them gambling in 2018 and publishers pulled paid boxes from Belgian versions. The Netherlands took a similar route. Neither collapsed a market, and both established that a national regulator can make a specific monetisation mechanic disappear from a global product.
The Digital Fairness Act is broader. It targets addictive design in general and proposes EU-wide age verification, which would apply across digital services rather than to gambling alone.
What this means for the platform holders
Sony’s own numbers show why monetisation pressure keeps rising. First-quarter FY2026 hardware shipments fell 36 per cent year on year to 1.6 million, taking the PS5 to 95.3 million lifetime. Total play time across PSN was down 4 per cent. PSN monthly active users held at 125 million, and 82 per cent of software sales were digital.
Flat engagement with flat hardware growth means revenue has to come from spending per user. That is exactly the direction that attracts regulatory attention, and doing it at the same moment Brussels is drafting rules is awkward timing.
The industry backdrop is not helping
January brought close to 900 layoffs after more than 5,000 across 2025. Playtika cut 15 per cent of its workforce. GDC’s survey found 28 per cent of respondents had lost a job in two years. In August the 55 billion dollar buyout of EA by PIF, Silver Lake and Affinity Partners closed, taking the publisher private.
Private ownership removes quarterly disclosure pressure. It does not remove regulators, and a publisher with that much debt service has fewer reasons to be conservative about monetisation.
The optimistic reading
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 took nine awards from twelve nominations at The Game Awards in December 2025, including Game of the Year, on a mid-sized budget with no live-service hooks at all. It sold on the strength of the game.
That is the cleanest available argument that the monetisation arms race is a choice rather than a necessity. Studios that make the other choice now have a commercial precedent to point at, and possibly a legal reason to want one.
The likely path from here is not a ban. It is disclosure and friction: mandatory odds display, spending summaries, cooling-off delays on top-ups, and age assurance at the storefront rather than the account. Every one of those already exists somewhere in European law, applied to a different industry, which means the drafting work is largely done.
Platform holders would be better off designing that themselves than waiting to have it designed for them. The gambling sector tried the second approach and does not recommend it.