"The game development industry has moved beyond typical tasks and has become a space for complex, multifaceted solutions," i-Legal on the outcomes of 2025

Together with top managers and experts from the gaming industry, as well as related fields, we continue to summarize the results of 2025. Up next is a conversation with Natalie Yurkova, Managing Partner at i-Legal, Maria Ordovskaya-Tanaevskaya, CEO, and the lawyer Alina Tankova.

How was 2025 for your company? What were the achievements, and what challenges did you encounter?

Natalie: The year was a period of reassessment, changes, and professional growth for our company. We navigated the year alongside our clients amidst sweeping global changes: legal reforms, business and economic transformations, and significant societal shifts. All these demanded new, often stringent requirements for speed and adaptability.

Notably, we restructured the company, bringing in new, strong leaders: Maria Ordovskaya, CEO, a corporate law and tax specialist, Alina Tankova, head of the digital practice, and Ailana Utnasunova, who led the corporate law and M&A practice. This cohesive team, which has long worked together, was able to introduce fresh perspectives into processes.

Among our key achievements were increased client trust and recognition of our expertise. In 2025, we were ranked in the "Law-300" in five categories, a significant acknowledgment of our work's quality. We are particularly proud of being in the top for intellectual property, largely due to successful cases in game development. Looking back at our 2024 plans, we can say we met the challenges head-on.

We aimed to expand our range of services related to intellectual property protection, strengthen ties with game developers, and increase our expertise in the application and regulation of artificial intelligence.

What are the key changes in the legal support of gaming companies over the past year?

Maria: Over the past year, we noticed changes in the approach to legal support for gaming companies, affecting not just the content of our consultations but also our firm's operational and business processes. The transformation was rooted in adopting the same agile methodologies used by game development teams, allowing us to be in sync with clients and adhere to industry standards of speed and flexibility.

Legal field changes, especially in user data, refunds, and content regulation, compelled us to integrate more deeply into the development processes. Lawyers now frequently become part of the product team, assessing risks at each stage of a game's lifecycle.

What issues did gaming companies consult with you most frequently in 2025?

Maria: Game development has long moved beyond typical tasks and has become a space for complex, multifaceted solutions. In 2025, companies increasingly sought our tailored approaches reflecting the industry's modern challenges and best practices. We rarely encounter standard requests, and each inquiry includes an active story, team ambitions, and a drive to advance regardless of obstacles.

Our digital practice leader, Alina Tankova, highlights three main areas:

User Relations Regulation

Companies have tightened data protection requirements, block procedures, and refund processes, following a global trend toward greater transparency and digital safety, especially for children. European CPC Network initiatives, for example, have sparked interest in user agreement audits.

Russia in 2025 also saw increased regulation of personal data and a greater need for oversight of information storage and processing. A separate trend was legal support for specific user claims: contesting bans, refunding in-game purchases, including those of minors. This shows companies aim to act lawfully, balancing user interests with their rights instead of providing templated responses.

Revisiting Creative Processes and Game Mechanics

An increasing interest in games with crypto elements is noticeable each year, making each case unique: it’s crucial to creatively balance innovations and regulatory risks.

Developers also extensively examine whether a project might qualify as gambling, a status affecting the product's fate in many countries. We conducted an in-depth audit for one client’s game with crypto trading and "gambling" elements, exploring the rules in over thirty jurisdictions, including half of the U.S. states.

AI integration is also noteworthy. Process automation, content generation, and new interaction forms pose complex societal questions. These concern not only ethical and legal AI applications but also protecting all involved parties' interests. As such, professional legal support becomes critically important at each stage—from development to deploying such technologies.

As for the “eternal” creative issues balancing legality, these often involve the legality of using real locations, personalities, characters, and quotations. Many developers wrongly believe that if their game popularizes culture—like the halls of the Hermitage or metro stations—they can use these freely. But that's incorrect. Permissions for recreating interiors or personalized elements are often needed, and “freedom of panorama” has subtle limitations. For instance, you can depict the Eiffel Tower, but its illuminated version is protected by copyright.

There's no one-size-fits-all answer—each case is unique. We collaborate with designers and creative directors to find solutions that not only protect the project but also add originality. How to make an allusion recognizable without falling into others' copyright traps? The answer often lies where law meets creativity, where legal frameworks themselves become a tool for new creative discoveries.

Tax Issues

Last year, plans to change tax legislation, such as lowering the VAT threshold for “simplified” taxation, were announced. We monitored this process closely, as it also affected us. Therefore, we are equipped to offer both information on upcoming 2026 changes and practical insights from our VAT transition experience.

I would also like to highlight new challenges and trends. For example, collaboration requests with domestic platforms like "VK Games." Our personal top picks include VR projects that are hard to classify as purely games, yet we cannot pass over them: the uniqueness of ideas and the focus on IP and early-stage protection capture our attention. Without going into detail, we can confidently say legal backing becomes a powerful competitive advantage here.

What legal risks did gaming companies underestimate in 2025, in your opinion?

Maria: One major mistake we observe is the significant underestimation of the need to establish intellectual property rights early on. This pertains to both relationships with creators and the use of third-party assets. Unfortunately, this leads to prolonged legal disputes, financial losses, and even the risk of project suspension or termination for legal reasons.

Moreover, companies are often unprepared for abrupt regulatory shifts, like the ban on certain symbols in Russia. A prime example was the prohibition of the "satanic movement," requiring companies to analyze and potentially alter storylines, visual imagery, and gameplay mechanics in already released products.

We recommend embedding legal flexibility into the game's script and structure, regularly auditing compliance with local legal requirements, and preparing a robust legal position for potential claims against sensitive content.

Another growing risk is content created with AI's help. The legal status of such content and the datasets used for their training is uncertain. However, early lawsuits and global regulatory trends signal that ignoring this issue is perilous.

What challenges do you identify related to the AI-ification of games?

Natalie: The primary challenges of integrating generative AI into games are legal. These include uncertainties around copyright for generated content and exposure to claims for training models on unlicensed data. Additionally, extensive user-generated AI content (UGC) significantly raises intellectual property infringement risks and moderation demands.

Furthermore, global regulations like the EU's AI Act or the Digital Services Act impose new transparency and risk assessment responsibilities on studios. Notably, our clients are global game development companies, so it's crucial for us to monitor these trends not only in Russia but worldwide, where clients might encounter challenges. Digital laws, especially, tend to spread in a chain reaction: what one day is tightly regulated in the EU or the USA might emerge in other countries, including Russia, soon after. Therefore, proactive analysis of international cases is critical in preparing our clients for future changes.

What legal trends in working with game development will strengthen in 2026?

Maria: We see several clear vectors. Firstly, lawyers will increasingly be involved from the design and testing phase of mechanics, including AI-related ones. This proactive approach prevents risks rather than addressing consequences. Secondly, tightening requirements in foreign jurisdictions will push companies to reevaluate their business structures, increasing demand for supporting such transactions.

We are confident that the companies that will lead are those whose lawyers think not as external consultants but as part of the team, understanding both technological and business processes.

What regulatory initiatives do you expect to see in 2026?

Natalie: The central theme will be achieving legal clarity amid uncertainty: AI content regulation, practices regarding crypto elements in games, and the evolution of personal data norms.

Overall, we expect 2026 to further complexify but also structure the legal landscape in game development, giving the market new directions for development and quality enhancement in both products and internal company processes.

We can predict increased regulation of monetization—transparency in loot boxes, aggressive sales mechanisms, and refunds following the EU model. The trend of strengthened child protection will continue, enforcing stricter age ratings and penalties for infractions.

We also foresee increased import substitution programs: aligned with government policies, there will be ongoing support for domestic game development through grants, infrastructure projects (such as the Moscow cluster), and the development of local platforms.

And lastly, what strategic steps does your company plan for the coming year?

Natalie: Our plans include continuing internal structural changes and strengthening our team. One priority is the AI-ification of our internal processes and the careful, thoughtful introduction of AI tools into legal practice.

However, no technology can replace the core ability to listen to clients and work as a team with them. We will continue to invest in interdisciplinary expertise among our specialists because a modern lawyer needs to understand not only laws but also the technological trends reshaping industries, including game development.

Maria: And, without a doubt, our focus remains on shifting from providing individual services to implementing comprehensive solutions that encompass all business aspects in response to client requests. Our constant focus is on developing integrated practices and enhancing expertise in rapidly changing industries, such as innovations, which enables us to offer truly integrated services.