5 Takeaways from the Games Industry Law Summit

TL;DR: At the 2026 Games Industry Law Summit in Berlin, online safety and age-appropriate design dominated the agenda. Five takeaways:

• Enforcement has hit a tipping point — regulators and private plaintiffs are targeting games.
• Self-declaration is now a liability, not just weak protection.
• Timing matters — you don't want to be first, but definitely not last.
• Regulatory “thrash” is the new normal — the alphabet soup of child-safety laws keeps growing.
• One-size-fits-all compliance no longer works (a single GDPR baseline isn't enough).

The Games Industry Law Summit, held this year in Berlin, Germany, brought together lawyers and experts from around the world to catch up, swap stories, and talk through the most pressing issues facing the games industry.

Unsurprisingly, the topic of online safety — specifically, complying with the increasingly overwhelming web of international rules around age assurance and age-appropriate design — was on nearly everyone's mind this year. Here are five of our biggest takeaways.

1. Online safety has reached a tipping point

Regulators and private plaintiffs alike are aggressively demanding better safety practices from the tech industry, and games are squarely in their crosshairs. If a game is perceived as harmful to children and still relies solely on users self-declaring their age, it's a likely enforcement target.

2. You can't charge in blindly — players care about privacy, security, and accessibility

As early industry attempts have shown, introducing age assurance is a delicate exercise with many players. Crafting the right message matters, and so does vetting your age assurance vendors to make sure they're robust, reliable, and trustworthy enough to handle players' sensitive data.

3. You don't want to be first — but you definitely don't want to be last

Companies that “over-comply” risk blowback from players and regulators alike, both wary of disproportionate data collection. Knowing where and when to deploy age assurance is critical — as is knowing what the rest of the industry is doing.

4. Regulatory “thrash” is causing real headaches

Panelists throughout the conference lamented the “alphabet soup” of new laws and regulations cropping up worldwide. How can you know when and where to deploy age assurance when the rules keep changing? Just keeping up takes enormous effort — even with dedicated resources.

5. One-size-fits-all is increasingly unsustainable

It used to be that you could set a reasonable global baseline (say, GDPR) and feel relatively safe. But accelerating regulatory fragmentation is making that strategy unworkable. Every time a country introduces a rule stricter than your standard, your options narrow to three: pull out of the country, accept the risk of non-compliance, or ask your product teams to make an exception — at which point you're not really one-size-fits-all anymore.

The good news

A better approach not only exists — it's already being deployed by game teams around the world. Companies use k-ID to track legal developments as they happen, benchmark against global market insights, and build flexible, adaptive compliance infrastructure that delivers both age assurance and age-appropriate design at scale.

If you'd like to learn more, contact us. We promise we won't sing Spice Girls at you.

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. Consult your own counsel on compliance with applicable laws.