Leaked EU Digital Fairness Act Would Switch Off Loot Boxes for Minors by Default

By CriticalPixel · 2026-11-10

The European Commission planned to unveil the Digital Fairness Act on Wednesday. It leaked first. A draft obtained and published by the French outlet Contexte, then picked apart within hours by the trade press, would switch loot boxes off by default for minors, lock paid virtual currencies behind parental approval, and force every game with paid random rewards to publish its drop odds. For a live service industry that has spent a decade insisting card packs are harmless fun, this is the bill it has been dreading.

What the draft actually does

The core rules sit in Articles 14 to 17. Any paid variable reward system has to tell players what is inside and how likely each item is, and it has to ship an easily accessible tool that switches the whole thing off. That part applies to everyone, adults included. For players under 18 the draft goes further and bans the sale of paid variable rewards outright. Article 16 does the same for pay-to-progress and pay-to-win mechanics, which covers the entire economy of a large slice of mobile games sold in Europe.

Article 14 aims at the other half of the machine, the fake money. Games that sell virtual currency would have to show the real world value of the items that currency buys. When a game is aimed at minors, or the company knows with reasonable certainty that minors play it, paid currency has to be off by default and can only be turned on with a parent or guardian's approval. Article 17 adds a switch for features that push compulsive use, and Article 10 bans interfaces that deceive or manipulate players. Those last two are not gaming specific, and that is the point: Brussels is treating digital shopfronts like shopfronts.

The entrance of the Berlaymont building in Brussels, headquarters of the European Commission, where the Digital Fairness Act was drafted.

Who counts as a minor

This is where the draft gets clever and ugly at once. There is no ID check in the text. According to Mobilegamer.biz, a game can be treated as aimed at minors if it carries an age rating below 18, which turns the PEGI badge on the box into the legal trigger. A PEGI 12 game with a shop is caught. The same report says minors count as a significant part of an audience at 25 percent, and that companies are on the hook once they are aware with reasonable certainty that minors are playing. A number on a rating label and a percentage in a spreadsheet decide whether a revenue stream survives.

Why the biggest games are exposed

EA Sports FC is the obvious target. Its Ultimate Team card packs are the model every other publisher copies, and as Eurogamer notes, PEGI already moved this year to hand loot box games a PEGI 16 rating by default, which quietly dragged EA's football series off the shelf it used to sit on. Fortnite's V-Bucks are the other textbook case: currency bought with real money, spent on rotating offers, never quite priced in your head. Both games are big enough that a European rule becomes the global default, because nobody is going to run two economies and two storefronts for one player base.

The industry saw this coming. Supercell boss Ilkka Paananen warned that tightening the rules on in game currency could deliver a critical blow and cripple the European games business, and the European Games Developer Federation backed him by calling in game currencies central to free-to-play mobile. That argument now gets tested in public. The counter argument is simpler than the lobbying suggests: a football game that sells a random draw of players is running a slot machine with a club crest on it, and no amount of framing about engagement changes the maths for the person paying.

Official Fortnite key art from Epic Games. V-Bucks are the paid virtual currency the leaked EU draft would lock behind parental approval for minors.

Nobody is banned tomorrow

The Digital Fairness Act is a proposal, not law. The Commission publishes it on 11 November, then it walks through Parliament and the Council, where every threshold becomes a bargaining chip. Eurogamer reports that the tracker timeline points to adoption in late 2027 and application around 2030. The draft also repeals the 2005 Unfair Commercial Practices Directive, so this is a rewrite of how Brussels polices digital selling, not a gaming side quest. Anyone expecting EA or Epic to rebuild a storefront this winter is going to wait a long time, and the same window gives publishers years to soften the text.

Reaction is early and thin. The leak landed this afternoon, so the loudest voices are trade press and policy people, not players. Video Games Industry Memo called it outright bad news for companies selling in game purchases and noted the scale of the change raises the question of whether the industry will roll out similar policies worldwide. There is no mass revolt yet, no review bombing, no studio statement beyond last year's Supercell warning. Treat any claim of a groundswell as premature. The people most upset right now are the ones who sell card packs for a living.

The CriticalPixel take

Odds disclosure is the easy part, and most studios could ship it in an afternoon. The default off rule is the part that actually hurts, because it turns a revenue stream into an opt in feature that plenty of parents will never switch on. Yet the draft dodges the hard question. Without age verification, off by default for minors depends on a ten year old not ticking a box, or on a PEGI rating doing work it was never designed to do. Brussels is outsourcing enforcement to a label that most parents ignore, then calling it protection.

The timing is the other tell. A law that applies around 2030 lands in the middle of the next console generation, after the current live service boom has banked its money. That gives publishers a comfortable runway to push the thresholds down, and the 25 percent audience test is the single line worth watching. Move that number up and the act stops touching most shooters and sports games. Move it down and half the free-to-play charts in Europe are in scope. When the official text drops tomorrow, read that clause before you read the press release.

The practical read for players is short. If you play something with card packs, crates or a premium currency, the odds of seeing a probability table and a disable switch in the next few years just went up, and an unofficial copy of the full text is already floating around for anyone who wants the fine print. Whether that switch defaults to off for a fifteen year old is the fight that starts tomorrow, and it will be fought with lobbyists, not patch notes.