A Milestone Moment: The Founding of the Digital Goods & Assets Association
Shaping the future of digital goods & assets. From gaming to digital markets.
In October 2025, we founded the Digital Goods & Assets Association (DGAA) as a European industry association, headquartered in Lucerne, with a clear goal:
To bring together marketplaces, companies, and stakeholders with touchpoints to digital goods particularly within the gaming industry to build shared standards, address regulatory challenges, and represent a unified European industry voice.
This mission is deeply personal to me.
When we started SkinBaron almost a decade ago, in 2016, as a marketplace for Counter-Strike skins (then CS:GO, today CS2), few would have expected this ecosystem to grow into a market with an estimated capitalization of around $5.7 billion today, just a few percent below its all-time high of approximately $6.06 billion (estimates by Pricempire, a third-party price aggregation platform tracking CS2 skin prices across multiple marketplaces. These values represent aggregated market estimates, not official or audited financial metrics).
Over the years, the industry evolved rapidly. Markets scaled, business models matured, and expectations increased. Regulation, however, did not keep pace.
As a result, many digital goods marketplaces including close industry peers now face fragmented and inconsistent legal frameworks, unclear regulatory interpretations, and significant legal and compliance costs, often just to defend existing business models. For many fundamental questions around digital goods, there is still no unified legislation and no common industry standard across Europe.
The scale of the Counter-Strike ecosystem illustrates that digital goods in gaming are no longer a niche phenomenon, but a macro-economically relevant digital asset class.
Importantly, many of the challenges seen in gaming marketplaces today are not unique. Similar questions around regulation, platform responsibility, taxation, and consumer protection exist across other digital asset classes including crypto assets, NFTs, and tokenized digital goods especially where marketplace-based business models are involved.
With the DGAA, we want to move the industry from isolated compliance toward collective action. I’m grateful to work alongside an experienced leadership team:
- Christian Müller, Vice President of DGAA, bringing deep expertise in business journalism, association leadership, and regulatory communication
- Tobias Andro, Board Member of DGAA and current CEO of SkinBaron, contributing hands-on marketplace and operational experience
Together, our aim is to bring marketplaces, gaming companies, infrastructure providers, legal experts, and policymakers together to help shape clear, fair, and workable frameworks that enable innovation instead of hindering it — in Europe and beyond.
If you are building, operating, advising, or regulating in the digital goods space and want to contribute, we would love to hear from you.
https://dgaa.digital/join-dgaa
Tobias Herberhold
Chair, Digital Goods & Assets Association (DGAA)