"Legal support has become much more strategic," says Alexandra Kurdyumova of Futura Digital about the main highlights of 2025.

We continue to summarize the results of 2025 with top managers and experts from the gaming industry (and related fields). Up next is an interview with Alexandra Kurdyumova, a senior partner and co-founder of Futura Digital.

What kind of year was 2025 for your company? What were you able to achieve, and what was the most challenging?

Alexandra Kurdyumova, Futura Digital: Honestly, 2025 was a challenging year. Very intense and a bit crazy: with events, projects, people, and the number of relocations.

Sometimes it felt like I was hardly ever home: Cyprus, Serbia, Tashkent, Dubai — and so on in a circle. In Cyprus, for example, I was about seven times during the year. We also visited Tashkent several times both for projects and as part of a strategic partnership, which I'll explain more about later. It was all interesting, thrilling, but required an enormous amount of energy.

Why were we moving so much? Because our typical client today is a company with a distributed team, and we need to be able to help them.

These are businesses without a single main office: part of the team is in Cyprus, part in Serbia, some in the CIS, and others work from Asia, the USA, or Europe. Often the founders themselves live between several countries.

In such a reality, legal and organizational matters become critical. Taxes, currency regulation, IP, personal data, various regulatory requirements — all of this needs to be taken into account simultaneously in different jurisdictions, which sometimes directly contradict each other.

There is no unified international law; there are many local systems that need to be aligned. For this, you not only need to study them but also be inside, keep your finger on the pulse, and build partnerships in the necessary countries.

At the same time, along with these partnerships and trips, we must not forget that we are still a business. We need to earn money, support the team, not lose quality, and be stable here and now. Balancing between these tasks, mission, and operations was truly challenging.

In summary, I would say that 2025 was a test of endurance for us.

All year long, we staunchly endured a heavy workload: including executing international projects with a high level of complexity and responsibility, sometimes multiplied by different time zones.

In which countries and hubs did you work the most this year?

Alexandra: The geography of our projects in 2025 was extremely broad. But to classify, I would highlight the key areas as:

• UAE and Cyprus — our main hubs, where many clients and projects are concentrated;
• Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan — as part of our work with the CIS and the young, rapidly growing ecosystems;
• Serbia and Portugal — as European locations for distributed teams;
• Hong Kong and Korea — as the most frequent projects in Asia (though, of course, several projects related to China appear annually as well);
• Besides the UAE, other MENA countries — specifically Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, which are currently very actively developing.

I constantly emphasize that in key locations where there are especially many projects, it becomes crucial for us not just to know the country but to be inside the ecosystem: to understand how hubs, IT parks, accelerators, and government initiatives operate. Therefore, we travel a lot, meet people, and build connections — this is part of our strategy that requires a lot of effort and time. But we believe in its importance.

For instance, in 2025, we signed a memorandum of strategic partnership with IT Park Uzbekistan. We did this not just for show: we deliberately picked Uzbekistan among other CIS countries as a young market with great potential.

Uzbekistan is the first step in our global goal: to build strong partnerships with key hubs in different regions (in the CIS, the Middle East, Europe, and Asia).

We hope that there will be many such partnerships, and right now we are in the process of discussing similar partnerships with other hubs in various regions. This is necessary so our clients can enter new jurisdictions faster and more easily and utilize the tools these countries offer, skillfully navigating between them, understanding the rules of the game, and feeling more confident.

What key changes do you see in the legal support of gaming companies?

Alexandra: In my opinion, legal support has become much more strategic.

In the era of AI, lawyers are required not so much to help with documents and registration, but more complex analytical work, understanding the architecture of processes, and interpreting the overall logic of law enforcement. All this directly affects the product, and sometimes even the business model of the company.

An example where regulation directly affects the product: the Digital Fairness Act and the general tightening on the regulation of loot boxes and the protection of users from manipulative practices (dark patterns, aggressive monetization, opaque mechanics, and others). The fact that lawmakers in different countries are increasing their focus on loot boxes, in-game purchases, interfaces, and marketing, certainly imposes restrictions on the business.

Another example: working with platforms. The whole year, we discussed Epic vs. Apple, and at the end of October, a case of Epic vs. Google appeared, where the court went even further and required Google Play to open up its payment infrastructure. All this is already changing the rules of the game for game development studios, platforms, and payment system providers (of which there are increasing numbers). Legal matters directly influence business.

And, of course, a separate large block (I think everyone has surely mentioned this in their summaries!) is artificial intelligence.

The number of inquiries about AI in gamedev has increased many times over: rights to assets, model training, dataset licensing, disclosure of AI use to investors. Regulation is just forming, and businesses find it difficult to navigate.

What issues do gaming companies most often approach you about?

Alexandra: The most frequent request is organizational.

• How to build the right corporate structure among different countries?
• How to avoid tax risks with a distributed team?
• How to consider different countries' regulations: currency restrictions, payments, personal data?

Plus classic questions: elaborating on tax and corporate structure, incorporation, IP, game blocking, stores, monetization, AI, there were more requests related to the regulation of crypto and Web3 projects (but perhaps we noticed this especially because we opened a separate crypto/fintech direction).

What legal risks did companies most often underestimate in 2025?

Alexandra: Organizational ones — tax, corporate, contractual structure. When you have a distributed team and multiple jurisdictions, mistakes in the structure can be very costly. Meanwhile, some worry too much (look at our most frequent requests this year), and others, conversely, don’t pay attention — and these are the cases that most often explode…

What trends and regulatory initiatives do you expect in 2026?

Alexandra: Digital Fairness Act, loot box regulation, further pressure on monetization, development of AI regulation — all this will transition from discussions to reality.

We expect the global story with platforms to continue: Apple, Google, alternative payments, new models of interaction with stores.

What strategic steps do you plan for next year?

Alexandra: The world is now complex and fragmented. Our task is to help companies not get lost in this complexity and make great games, in any market and anywhere in the world.

We will continue to build the infrastructure to fulfill this task — quickly and efficiently, with love for our clients.

Furthermore, we are steadily moving from pure legal towards broader consulting, not only legal. Currently, we are conducting customer development and working a lot on expanding our product line, hoping to delight the market with new opportunities from us and our partners.

Additionally, I have a personal strategic focus — Women in Games. I attended the first conference in Cyprus, co-organized by Axlebolt, Xsolla, and WN, and it was a wonderful event that brought together fantastic women in the industry. We want to help launch similar events in the UAE, and I would be happy if I could become one of the inspirers and organizers of such an initiative in Dubai.