Dutch tech news Tweakers.net reports that Cowboy, an e-bike company from the Netherlands, has stopped offering its urban racing game Race. The game allowed e-bike users to engage in 500-meter competitive racing games in the city. E-bikes in the Netherlands are becoming increasingly ubiquitous and are receiving a lot of backlash for being unsafe and illegally upgraded to achieve speeds way above the legal maximum of 25km/h.
A number of public officials earlier have criticized the game Race for inciting unsafe and potentially illegal behavior on public roads.
The use of the city as a canvas for playing urban games has been described by many (including myself >>). It is interesting to see that by now, there seems to be a much faster feedback loop, and stricter clampdown, between digital platforms/products and government policies. This is already visible in for instance the platform economy and accommodation apps. The age of the digital cowboy seems to be over, at least in the Netherlands and in Europe at large.
Link to original article on Tweakers.net >>
See also the coverage (in Dutch) on RTL Nieuws >>