Nine video game companies are now under formal scrutiny from European consumer regulators, and the list reads like a cross-section of the entire industry. The European Commission first opened its probes into the nine companies in September 2026, before Microsoft’s Mojang studio, Riot Games, Supercell, Ubisoft, Crytek, and four other publishers were formally named on October 1, 2026, in a coordinated enforcement action carried out by the Commission and the Consumer Protection Cooperation (CPC) Network. The target isn’t gameplay or content. It’s how these companies sell virtual currency, and whether players actually understand what they’re paying for.
The nine games named in the action, first reported in September 2026 when the CPC action covered Minecraft, Valorant, and Candy Crush Saga alongside six other titles, are Candy Crush Saga, Minecraft, Clash of Clans, Valorant, For Honor, Hunt: Showdown 1896, Forge of Empires, Gardenscapes, and Mech Arena. Combined, those titles reach hundreds of millions of players across mobile, PC, and console. For a games industry that has spent the better part of a decade shifting from one-time purchases toward live-service monetization, this is the most sweeping consumer-protection action yet aimed squarely at the mechanics of virtual currency itself.
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What the EU actually announced on October 1
According to Ireland’s Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (CCPC), the action was launched jointly with consumer authorities across the European Union on October 1, 2026, with the European Commission coordinating enforcement through the CPC Network, the body that brings together the competent consumer authorities of all 27 EU member states. The CCPC described the action as covering “in-game purchases, in-game virtual currencies, consumer rights when making purchases, transparency around costs, and the fairness of terms and conditions.” In practice, the CCPC’s description of the coordinated actions comes down to 3 issues: pricing, purchase rights, and contract fairness. The European Commission has said the investigations followed a round of industry dialogue on virtual currencies held in 2025, framing the formal action as an escalation after those voluntary discussions failed to resolve regulators’ underlying concerns.
The nine companies were first named in September 2026 reporting that singled out Crytek, King, Mojang, Riot Games, and Ubisoft before the full roster became public. The official European Commission filing lists them as Crytek GmbH, InnoGames GmbH, King.com Operations (Malta) Limited, Mojang AB, Plarium Europe S.à r.l., PLR Worldwide Sales Limited, Riot Games Limited, Supercell Oy, and Ubisoft EMEA SAS, according to GamesIndustry.biz. Each entity is tied to a specific title under review: King’s Candy Crush Saga, Mojang’s Minecraft and Mech Arena, Supercell’s Clash of Clans, Riot’s Valorant, Ubisoft’s For Honor, Crytek’s Hunt: Showdown 1896, InnoGames’ Forge of Empires, and Plarium’s Gardenscapes.
Consumer advocacy group BEUC (the European Consumer Organisation) confirmed the same timeline in its own statement, noting the Commission and the CPC Network announced the nine coordinated enforcement actions on September 30, 2026, with public disclosure following the next day. BEUC also said the case followed a consumer-group complaint filed in 2024. Several outlets, including the Irish Times, framed the action around the three most recognizable names on the list: Candy Crush, Minecraft, and Clash of Clans, even though the formal filing spans a much broader swath of genres, from shooters to city-builders to extraction survival games.
Why virtual currency, specifically
The investigation isn’t about loot boxes in the gambling-adjacent sense that dominated headlines in Belgium and the Netherlands years ago. It’s narrower and arguably more structural: how games price items in virtual currency rather than real money, and whether that design makes it harder for a player to know what they’re actually spending.
Regulators are enforcing the EU’s Key Principles on in-game virtual currencies, a framework the CPC Network first published in March 2025 and has used before but rarely at this scale. The practices under review, based on the official descriptions from the Commission and CCPC, cluster around a handful of recurring complaints: displaying prices primarily in gems, coins, or gold rather than euros; selling currency in bundles that rarely match what a specific item costs, forcing players to buy more than they need; obscuring exchange rates between real money and in-game currency; and burying cancellation or refund rights inside terms of service that few players read before tapping “buy.”
None of this requires randomness or chance-based mechanics, which is what made Belgium’s 2018 gambling-law intervention against paid loot boxes a narrower tool. A player buying a fixed-price skin with a currency bundle they didn’t fully use isn’t gambling in any legal sense. But regulators argue it can still be an unfair commercial practice if the pricing is deliberately opaque. That distinction is the core of why this action touches Minecraft and Valorant, games with no randomized loot mechanics at all, alongside gacha-adjacent titles like Clash of Clans and Candy Crush.
The legal machinery behind the action
The CPC Network operates under Regulation (EU) 2017/2394, which lets national consumer authorities coordinate cross-border investigations into practices affecting consumers across multiple member states. Industry analysis points to several underlying EU consumer-law instruments likely in play, chiefly the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive (2005/29/EC), which prohibits misleading actions, misleading omissions, and aggressive sales tactics, and the Consumer Rights Directive (2011/83/EU), which governs pre-contract pricing disclosure for digital content and services.
Penalties in these cases don’t follow a single fixed schedule. Under the Omnibus Directive (EU 2019/2161), member states must provide for fines of at least 4% of a company’s annual turnover in the countries affected for widespread, EU-wide infringements, though the exact ceiling varies by national implementing law and by how serious or persistent a violation is found to be. No fine has been levied against any of the nine companies as of this story’s publication. The process so far is an information-gathering and assessment phase, not a verdict.
That procedural distinction matters for how the industry should read this news. The CPC Network’s typical playbook runs through several stages: authorities request internal data on pricing, currency-bundle structures, and purchase-flow design; companies are given an opportunity to respond or voluntarily amend practices; and only if a resolution can’t be reached through negotiated commitments do national regulators escalate to formal infringement findings, fines, or injunctions. Companies that previously went through CPC actions, including some targeted in Google and Apple app-store cases, have often settled through voluntary changes rather than contested fines.
| Company | Game Under Review | Genre | Market Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| King (King.com Operations Malta) | Candy Crush Saga | Mobile match-3 | Perennial top-grossing mobile title |
| Mojang AB (Microsoft) | Minecraft, Mech Arena | Sandbox / mobile shooter | One of the best-selling games ever made |
| Supercell | Clash of Clans | Mobile strategy | Running continuously since 2012 |
| Riot Games | Valorant | Tactical shooter | Major global esports title |
| Ubisoft EMEA | For Honor | Action combat | Long-running live-service title |
| Crytek | Hunt: Showdown 1896 | Extraction shooter | Growing live-service base |
| InnoGames | Forge of Empires | Browser/mobile strategy | Long-tenured browser strategy title |
| Plarium Europe | Gardenscapes | Mobile puzzle | Top-grossing mobile puzzle franchise |
The company and title pairings above are drawn directly from the European Commission’s own enforcement filing and corroborated across GamesIndustry.biz, the Irish Times, and BEUC’s statement. A ninth entity, PLR Worldwide Sales Limited, appears in the official filing without a clearly associated title in the materials reviewed.
Historical precedent: Belgium, the Netherlands, and a decade of loot-box fights
This isn’t the first time European regulators have gone after game monetization, but it is the broadest coordinated action to date. Belgium’s Gaming Commission concluded in 2018 that paid loot boxes in titles including Star Wars Battlefront II, Overwatch, and FIFA 18 could qualify as games of chance requiring a gambling license under Belgian law. Electronic Arts disabled paid loot-box purchasing in Belgium in response, and several publishers quietly pulled randomized monetization from the Belgian market entirely rather than pursue a license.
The Netherlands took a parallel but distinct path. The Dutch Gaming Authority ruled in 2018 that loot boxes with transferable, tradeable contents could violate the country’s Betting and Gaming Act. Electronic Arts contested an administrative fine tied to FIFA loot boxes, and Dutch courts ultimately sided with EA on the specific facts of that case, finding the system in question didn’t meet the legal threshold for a gambling product. That outcome became a cautionary tale for regulators: loot-box enforcement lives or dies on granular design details like randomness, tradeability, and whether virtual items carry real secondary-market value.
What makes the October 2026 action different is that it sidesteps the gambling-law argument entirely. By anchoring the case in consumer-protection and pricing-transparency law instead, the CPC Network avoids the evidentiary fights over randomness and tradeability that tripped up the Dutch case against EA. Virtual currency pricing is a simpler, more universal target: almost every live-service game sells some version of a currency bundle, which means the legal theory here could, in principle, scale across the industry far more easily than loot-box gambling claims ever did.
Why these nine, and not others
The breadth of genres represented, puzzle, sandbox, tactical shooter, extraction survival, strategy, is likely deliberate. Regulators appear to be building a cross-genre test case rather than targeting a single monetization pattern. A ruling or settlement that applies equally to Candy Crush’s gem economy and Valorant’s Radianite Points would set a template far harder for other publishers to argue around on genre-specific grounds.
It’s also notable which companies are absent from the Commission’s headline nine. Electronic Arts and Take-Two don’t appear among the named entities in the official filing, despite running some of the largest virtual-currency economies in gaming through titles like EA Sports FC and NBA 2K. Activision Blizzard is a partial exception: separate September 2026 reporting described a related action covering two of its titles, Call of Duty Mobile and Diablo Immortal, and by October 2026 the law firm TLT was tracking a broader tally of ten companies across eleven games under CPC Network scrutiny, a wider count than the Commission’s headline nine. Some early media coverage conflated Microsoft’s ownership of Activision Blizzard with the Candy Crush case, since King is itself a Microsoft subsidiary following the 2023 acquisition, but the formal filing lists King.com Operations (Malta) Limited as the named entity, not Activision Blizzard or Microsoft’s corporate parent directly. That distinction matters for anyone trying to map which corporate groups actually face exposure.
The industry’s structural dependence on virtual currency
Virtual currency isn’t a side feature for most of the nine companies named. It’s the primary revenue engine. Mobile free-to-play titles like Candy Crush Saga and Clash of Clans generate the overwhelming majority of their revenue through in-app purchases denominated in gems, gold, or gems-equivalent currencies rather than direct real-money transactions. Minecraft’s Minecoins, used to buy skins and content in the Marketplace, follow the same model layered onto a title that otherwise sells as a traditional one-time purchase. Valorant’s Valorant Points and Riot Points fund cosmetic skins that have become one of Riot’s largest revenue categories outside esports sponsorship.
That structural dependence is exactly what makes this investigation consequential beyond the nine named companies. If regulators force changes to how currency bundles are priced, displayed, or sized, for instance requiring exact-match currency denominations so players never have “leftover” currency, or requiring real-money price display alongside virtual currency amounts, the engineering and UX changes required would likely ripple across the entire free-to-play and live-service industry, not just the nine titles under direct review.
Competitive and market impact across the industry
For publishers not currently named, the smart move is almost certainly a defensive audit. Legal and compliance teams at major studios are likely reviewing their own virtual-currency pricing structures against the same criteria regulators are applying to the nine named games, since a template established here could become the baseline expectation for the entire EU market regardless of which specific company gets formally sanctioned first.
This mirrors a pattern the games industry has seen before with EU digital regulation. When the Digital Services Act began applying “Very Large Online Platform” obligations to Roblox, publishers across the industry started reassessing their own content-moderation and age-verification systems well before any formal finding against Roblox itself landed. The same dynamic is likely to play out here: expect virtual-currency pricing reviews at major publishers over the next two to three months, independent of what happens to the nine named companies specifically.
There’s also a cost dimension worth flagging. Redesigning currency-bundle economics isn’t trivial engineering work. Games with years of live-service history, Clash of Clans and Candy Crush Saga have both run since 2012, Minecraft’s Marketplace since 2017, have built pricing architectures with deep assumptions about bundle sizes and currency-to-dollar ratios baked into years of monetization tuning. Changing those structures risks disrupting revenue models that have been calibrated over a decade of A/B testing and player-spending data.
Comparing the EU’s approach to the US and UK
There is no confirmed, directly comparable 2026 investigation from the US Federal Trade Commission or the UK Competition and Markets Authority targeting these same nine companies or this same virtual-currency pricing question at this scale. The closest US precedent remains older: the FTC’s 2014 settlement with Apple over unauthorized in-app purchases by children, followed by subsequent actions involving Amazon and Google on similar grounds. The UK has scrutinized loot boxes and child-directed game design through both consumer and gambling-policy channels in past years, but nothing currently on record matches the breadth of the EU’s October 2026 coordinated action.
That regulatory gap is itself a competitive dynamic worth watching. If the EU sets a binding precedent on virtual-currency pricing transparency while the US and UK remain comparatively permissive, publishers may face a bifurcated compliance landscape: one set of currency-bundle rules for EU players, another for the rest of the world. Companies that already run region-specific pricing and compliance systems, which most major live-service publishers do for tax and age-rating reasons, are better positioned to absorb that split than smaller studios running a single global build.
| Jurisdiction | Primary Legal Theory | Status as of October 2026 | Scope |
|---|---|---|---|
| European Union (CPC Network) | Unfair commercial practices / consumer rights / pricing transparency | Active coordinated investigation, no fines issued yet | 9 companies, 9 games, EU-wide |
| Belgium (2018) | National gambling law (games of chance) | Resolved; EA disabled paid loot boxes in Belgium | Single-country, loot-box specific |
| Netherlands (2018-era) | Betting and Gaming Act (tradeable items) | Dutch courts rejected fine against EA on case facts | Single-country, loot-box specific |
| United States (FTC) | Children’s unauthorized purchases | No confirmed 2026 action matching this scope | Historical precedent only (2014 Apple case) |
| United Kingdom (CMA) | Consumer and gambling policy review | No confirmed 2026 action matching this scope | Historical policy review only |
What company statements have, and haven’t, said
As of this story’s publication, none of the nine named companies, King, Mojang, Supercell, Riot, Ubisoft, Crytek, InnoGames, Plarium, or PLR Worldwide Sales, has issued a detailed public rebuttal or committed to specific remedial changes. That silence is fairly typical at this early stage of a CPC Network action, where companies are more likely to engage directly with regulators through formal information requests than through public statements, at least until a resolution framework or settlement is on the table.
The European Commission’s own framing has stayed within the bounds of “suspected” practices rather than confirmed findings, consistent with the early investigative stage of the process. BEUC, representing consumer groups across the bloc, has been the most vocal outside party, characterizing the scale of the action as evidence that virtual-currency pricing has become a bloc-wide concern rather than an isolated dispute with any single publisher. You can read the full BEUC statement here.
What happens next in the investigation
The CPC Network’s typical process runs through several phases, and the Commission’s October 1 announcement did not set a public deadline for any of them. First comes information gathering, where authorities request internal documentation on pricing structures, currency-bundle design, disclosure practices, and terms of service. Next is assessment against both EU-wide and national consumer law, run in parallel by the relevant member-state authorities. Companies are typically given room to propose voluntary undertakings, changes to pricing displays or bundle structures, before regulators escalate toward formal enforcement.
If a company and regulators can’t reach a negotiated resolution, national authorities retain the power to issue compliance orders, injunctions, or fines under their own domestic consumer-protection statutes, with the 4%-of-turnover threshold from the Omnibus Directive as a reference ceiling for the most serious, EU-wide infringements. Any formal decision would also be subject to judicial review in national courts, a process that, based on the Netherlands’ EA loot-box case, can stretch well beyond a year. Full background on the EU’s coordinated-actions framework is available on the European Commission’s own page.
Five predictions for how this plays out
First, expect at least two or three of the nine named companies to announce voluntary pricing-transparency changes within six to nine months, most likely clearer real-money price labeling alongside virtual currency amounts, rather than wait for a contested fine. That’s the pattern Electronic Arts followed in Belgium and the pattern most companies follow when facing a CPC Network action with a plausible compliance path.
Second, other major free-to-play publishers not currently named, think Electronic Arts, Activision Blizzard, Take-Two, and large mobile gacha publishers, will quietly audit and likely adjust their own currency-bundle structures in the EU over the next two quarters, independent of any formal action against them specifically. Nobody wants to be the next name added to this list.
Third, no fines are likely to be formally levied against any of the nine companies before mid-2027, given the multi-stage process the CPC Network typically follows and the absence of any public deadline in the October 1 announcement.
Fourth, the UK’s CMA and possibly the US FTC will face renewed pressure from consumer advocates to open parallel investigations, given the precedent this sets, though neither body has signaled imminent action as of this story’s publication.
Fifth, expect this case to become a reference point in future EU digital-policy debates well beyond gaming, since virtual currency and point systems have spread into adjacent categories like social media gifting, creator-economy tipping, and streaming platform tokens that share the same core pricing-transparency concerns regulators are raising here.
How this connects to Europe’s broader gaming regulation push
This action doesn’t exist in isolation. The EU has spent much of 2026 tightening its regulatory grip on gaming platforms through multiple parallel tracks. Apple cut its EU App Store core technology fees to 5% for alternative marketplaces starting October 1, 2026, a restructuring aimed partly at easing compliance friction for developers distributing games outside Apple’s own storefront. Roblox was designated a “Very Large Online Platform” under the Digital Services Act earlier in 2026, triggering a stricter content-moderation and transparency timeline. And Epic Games founder Tim Sweeney has publicly criticized the EU’s proposed Kids Act social-media provisions as overreaching for how they could apply to gaming platforms with social features.
Taken together, the pattern is unmistakable: Brussels is treating game platforms less like traditional entertainment software and more like the kind of consumer-facing digital marketplaces it already regulates heavily, think app stores, streaming subscriptions, and social platforms. The virtual-currency investigation is simply the latest, and arguably most direct, application of that posture to the mechanics of how games make money.
What players should actually expect to change
For the average Candy Crush, Minecraft, or Clash of Clans player in the EU, nothing changes immediately. The investigation hasn’t produced any mandated redesign yet, and the companies involved haven’t announced voluntary changes as of this story’s publication. But the practical direction of travel, based on both the specific practices under review and the precedent set by prior EU digital-platform cases, points toward a few plausible outcomes if the investigation produces binding commitments: real-money price tags displayed next to virtual currency costs at the point of purchase, currency bundles resized to more closely match actual item prices rather than forcing leftover-currency purchases, and clearer pre-purchase disclosure of refund and cancellation rights for digital content.
None of those changes would eliminate virtual currency as a business model. They would simply make the economics more legible to the player doing the spending, which is precisely the stated goal of the CPC Network’s intervention.
Frequently Asked Questions
Which nine companies are under investigation?
Crytek, InnoGames, King (King.com Operations Malta), Mojang AB, Plarium Europe, PLR Worldwide Sales, Riot Games, Supercell, and Ubisoft EMEA, tied respectively to Hunt: Showdown 1896, Forge of Empires, Candy Crush Saga, Minecraft and Mech Arena, Gardenscapes, an unspecified title, Valorant, Clash of Clans, and For Honor.
Is this about loot boxes or gambling?
No. Unlike Belgium’s 2018 action, this investigation is based on consumer-protection and pricing-transparency law, focused on how virtual currency is sold and priced, not on randomized reward mechanics.
Who is leading the investigation?
The European Commission is coordinating the action through the CPC Network, with national consumer authorities, including Ireland’s CCPC, participating as the authorities with direct enforcement power in their own jurisdictions.
Have any fines been issued?
No. As of this story’s publication, the action is in an investigative and information-gathering stage. No formal infringement finding or fine has been announced against any of the nine companies.
What’s the maximum possible fine?
Under the EU’s Omnibus Directive, member states must provide for fines of at least 4% of a company’s relevant annual turnover for serious, widespread, cross-border infringements, though the exact figure depends on national law and the specific finding.
Why aren’t Electronic Arts, Activision Blizzard, or Take-Two on the list?
The official Commission filing names only the nine specific legal entities listed above. Their absence doesn’t mean their monetization practices are exempt from future scrutiny, only that they weren’t named in this specific coordinated action.
Will prices or currency bundles change for players right away?
Not immediately. Any changes would likely follow either voluntary commitments from the companies involved or a formal regulatory finding, both of which take months under the CPC Network’s typical process.
How does this compare to US or UK regulation?
Neither the US FTC nor the UK CMA has a confirmed 2026 investigation matching this scope. The closest US precedent is the FTC’s 2014 settlement with Apple over unauthorized in-app purchases by children.
