What do games have to do to comply

There are two answers to this question.

The short but not-very-helpful answer:

Follow Ofcom’s guidance and to complete the:

• Children’s access assessment, (should have been completed by Jan 2025)
• Illegal content assessment and safety duties, (should have been completed by March 2025)
• Children’s risk assessment, (should have been completed by April 2025)
• Comply with Children’s Safety Duties. (Due July 25th 2025 at the latest)

Ofcom has hundreds of pages of guidance as well as online/interactive tools regarding how to do this. I recommend your DPO, legal team, or designated child safety officer (which is a new named person you have to have) read and complete these steps.

Although this is critically important, and you need to do this, it’s not a helpful answer as an overview to the games industry. As a result, I’ve condensed a lot of information to give you a more full and useful answer. That said, you still need to do the above.

The long but helpful answer

Firstly, I need to provide some context.

In the following sections we will cover all of the details:

1. The types of content that the OSA & Ofcom are regulating
2. Risk factors specific to games
3. Codes of practice and recommended measures
4. At the end, based on these, we will then cover what you need to practically implement