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Closing economics-games.com on 20 September 2026

This page concerns only our free site (economics-games.com). Our commercial simulations on lud.io are not affected.

What this means in practice

  • Until 20 September 2026, the site will remain accessible under the same conditions as today.
  • From 20 September 2026 onwards, the games will no longer be available.

Why we're making this decision

The site has always been offered free of charge, with no advertising, no data resale, and no subscription. It was funded entirely through cross-subsidy from our commercial activity.

When we launched it over a decade ago, the free site made sense for several reasons that held together:

  • the costs and effort were mutualised with our commercial offering — very little specific overhead, little time required, real technical synergies;
  • there was a low risk of the free site cannibalising our paid offering;
  • the risk of our simulation models being scraped and reused elsewhere was, at the time, moderate;
  • and the hacking risk was relatively low as well.

Over time, with the arrival of new technologies, every one of these points has turned around:

  • the technical synergies between the free and the commercial sides have largely disappeared;
  • the costs and time required for maintenance and security have exploded — dealing with bot attacks (or massive scraping phases), needing to switch some games to a controlled mode, the site getting harder and harder to secure, constant monitoring required;
  • the risk of our models (also used in some of our commercial offers) being scraped gets higher the more we keep access open without control.

It has now become very difficult, for a small outfit like ours, to maintain a dynamic site wide open to the world. The resources required — particularly for security — keep growing, while the conditions that once made this model viable keep eroding.

Our commercial activity

Our paid simulations on lud.io are not affected by this closure and remain available under the same conditions as today. The controlled scale of that platform makes it structurally much easier to secure and sustain.

If you have questions, you can reach us at contact@economics-games.com.

Published April 2026