The Koreans Are Not Playing Around

A ban on Facebook games looks set to irritate South Korean players as government attempts to regulate for a fee.

Normally when one is told the Koreans are stamping down hard on Facebook in some effort to control what their citizens can and cannot do online, there is a tendency to instantly picture massed coordinated marching crowds streaming by a dais of party officials as heroic images of scenes from the nations glorious history are created by well choreographed school children somewhere that appears to have got stuck in 1978. One does not, therefore, expect to be corrected and be told that far from this being action taken by the North Korean dictatorship, it is being done by the apparently democratic government of South Korea.

Clamp Down On Facebook Games

• “Social gambling industry” hit hard
• South Koreans make Facebook gambling news
• Additional fees required for continued service

What began on August 26th as a block on financial transactions towards game providers on the social site Facebook snowballed into a carpet ban on what they term the “social gambling industry”. Leaving aside the fact that “social gambling industry” sounds like a rather amusing euphemism for international diplomacy, it appears that the South Koreans might have underestimated the backlash that this will undoubtedly create as it attempts to bring Facebook’s offerings inline with the Game Industry Promotions Act of Dec. 2013 that regulates online gambling sites in South Korea.

In what appears little more than a governmental shake down those game providers that wish to continue their services must apply to do so with the Game Rating and Administration Committee and have their product both reviewed and then rated over a fifteen day period for what is dismissed as an “additional fee”. The nine person rating panel will then decide which of four categories each title falls into. These are age based, traveling from “adults only” through 15+, 12+ down to the rather broad category of “All” which apparently means anyone can play it.

Whilst rating games online for the benefit of parents and other consumers is all very laudable the imposition of fees upon the process is tantamount to robbery, and with titles like Farmville and Candy Crush Saga amongst those from which their players are cut off, it seems the government is willing to hold gamers hostage whilst games providers find the random money. Facebook was recently valued at $200 billion, which probably explains this sudden desire by the South Koreans to be so helpful… at a price.