Revenue opportunities for game developers in the wake of the European Union’s Digital Markets Act

venturebeat.com:

The European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) — all 66 pages of it — was activated almost exactly a year ago, became generally applicable this year on May 2, and will start to be enforced around March of next year. Its aim, of course, is to regulate major online platforms and gatekeepers, and the goal is to establish fair competition, consumer protection and data privacy. It’s pretty certain that the online global gaming industry, in which developers and game studios are profoundly affected by platform dynamics, will feel the brunt of the changes wrought by the DMA.

At GamesBeat Next 2023, Josephine Friday, senior business development manager of enterprise mobile gaming, Americas, at Xsolla, was joined by Felix Hilgert, tech and games lawyer and partner at Osborne Clarke as well as Don Reilley, EVP of Publisher Development & Partnerships, SCUTI to talk about what developers, studios and industry professionals need to know, right here and now — and where the opportunities lie.

Taking down the gatekeepers, Reilley said, is “all about the publishers being able to control how they are able to go out and generate revenue for their games, so that they can reinvest that and continue to do what they’re here to do, which is create great products and great experiences for gamers to participate in.”

The act directly applies only to certain large companies, the so-called gatekeepers, Hilgert said: Meta, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Apple and ByteDance for TikTok, but that doesn’t mean game companies can relax.

Core platform services are in the scope of this act, including search engines, browsers, operating systems, social networks and importantly for game industry professionals, what they call online intermediaries or intermediary