South Korean Government Threatens Ban on Unrated Games

South Korean indie developers and some bigger fish such as Valve are facing a large crackdown on their games that don’t adhere to laws. The legislation requires all games to be rated before they can be supplied to the public, according to reports.

South Korea’s Game Rating Board (GRB) requires that every game is rated if it is publicly available, which the developer/publisher must pay for. While this isn’t so much an issue for large publishers, it’s becoming a serious problem for smaller devs, who often cannot afford to pay for a rating which could cost hundreds of US dollars. The GRB bases the cost on the game’s file size, apparently, as well as other features in the game, including network capability and genre.

This means that if a developer releases a game for free or online, he/she would still have to pay the GRB to rate their game.

According to reports, this had led the South Korean government issuing a warning to all sites hosting indie games to delete all offenders’ games. Valve’s Steam is also being apparently threatened, with the GRB suggesting that Valve would have to send each unrated game to them, and with 5GB+ file sizes for each game, that could be a pretty hefty amount of money.

Most of this comes from a post on Reddit by a fan who has translated several Korean news articles. There’s also a translation on Team Liquid, as well as reports on TIG Source and the two links below. I’ve emailed Valve for some official confirmation, but I’ve not heard back yet.

Earlier in the year the South Korean government threatened to ban Google’s Android Market, which features around 4,000 unrated titles. In a letter to Google, the Games Rating Board said that “if Google fails to make any corrective measures, we may have to completely shut down the Android marketplace in South Korea.”

Apparently, the South Korean government may be looking at alternative measures other than shutting such large providers of videogames down, but the threat is still there.

There’s a related post regarding this (and the general rating of all mobile/social games) on GamerLaw that’s worth a read, too.

Via: Kotaku, GamesIndustry.biz