The EU Kids Act Could Make Gamers Prove Their Age Before Playing Certain Games
The EU is about to make some games ask for your ID. The EU Kids Act goes before the European Parliament on Thursday, and if it passes, players could have to verify their age just to open an account on certain platforms and games. It’s a proposal that’s been brewing for over a year, and it lands right alongside Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s State of the Union address.
What the EU Kids Act actually proposes
According to internal documents obtained by Euractiv, the Act would oblige providers of social media and video-sharing platforms to run age verification whenever a user opens a new account. Crucially for us, those checks extend beyond social media to AI chatbots and companions, and to “online games that are risky to minors.” Services could lean on the EU’s own age-verification tool or another solution built by public authorities to do the checking.
It’s not a blanket net over everything. The rules are aimed at what the draft calls social media “plus” services, and they specifically wouldn’t apply to online education, public-authority services, or industrial and office AI tools. The target is consumer platforms where kids spend their time, gaming very much included.
The proposed age tiers
The draft sets an EU-wide minimum age of 15 to open an autonomous account, with tiered restrictions underneath that for anyone under 18. Children aged 0 to 3 would get no access to social media or risky services at all. From 3 up to 13, parents could open fully parent-controlled accounts on child-friendly services that meet the proposal’s safety standards. Between 13 and 15, a parent would set up an “introductory” account. Only from 15 to 18 would a young person get an autonomous account, and only if the platform is “safe by design.”
The “safe by design” bit that hits games
This is the part worth watching. To count as “safe by design,” a service has to drop addictive design features like infinite scrolling, rein in its recommender algorithms, and ship with safe account settings by default. That’s aimed squarely at the engagement-maximising, keep-you-playing mechanics a lot of modern games and platforms are built on. The draft also floats a “supervisory fee,” a levy that designated tech companies would pay the Commission to fund enforcement.
Part of a much bigger age-verification wave
The EU isn’t acting in a vacuum. PlayStation started rolling out age checks back in April across Ireland and the UK, gating network features like voice chat, messaging and streaming behind a facial scan, a mobile number, or an ID. Australia recently went further, putting proof-of-age on Steam for R18+ games, and awkwardly it only accepts Australian credit cards, which leaves plenty of adult players without an easy way through. The US has no federal law yet, though several states have passed their own versions.
Gavaroc@gavaroc.bsky.socialThat has not changed. A debit card is entirely accepted on steam for regular custom.
The -credit card requirement- is for age verification only, and simply unlocks -access- to the store pages for games that steam deems adult.
What happens next, and the catch
Thursday is the unveiling, not the finish line. The proposal still has to move through the European Parliament before any of this becomes law, so nothing changes for your library overnight. The real sticking point is privacy. Age verification means handing a platform your government ID or a scan of your face, and we’ve already seen how that can go wrong: Discord paused its own global age-verification plans after hackers got hold of roughly 70,000 images of users’ government IDs.
Protecting kids online and killing off deliberately addictive design are genuinely hard things to argue against. The worry isn’t the goal, it’s the mechanism. Building a system where millions of adults hand over IDs and face scans to play games is a huge honeypot, and the people who’ll feel it first aren’t children, they’re every adult gamer who now has to prove who they are before they press start.
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