> Limiting access for EU users is an easy way to sidestep a hell of a lot of potential legal liability. It’s a fast-moving and complex regulatory environment that is focused on punishing/controlling big US businesses.

Have you considered a less paranoid explanation, like... focused on protecting Europeans from the abuses of big corporations?

Companies like google are quite well equiped to launch anything globally.

And in this specific case, its a Chess demo, its probably something different

It’s blocked in more than the EU.

It seems it wouldn’t be hard to list the regions it’s available and at least allow a description of what it is. To know if it’s worth using VPN

That is focused on protecting costumers (mostly their own).

There I fixed it for you ;)