The infamous «Gacha» is plaguing the modern mobile gaming industry and South Korea recently decided to take action on the matter. In case you didn’t know, this is a mechanic that has been implemented in all types of games for years, in which a player can pay real money for the possibility of obtaining a random item or character. In this way, companies can easily take advantage of their consumers. But this new Korean law shows that this is about to change.
In Korea, companies are obliged to disclose the possibilities of gacha
A few months ago, the South Korean government established a new Gacha Disclosure Law, which began to be implemented in March of this year. As reported by the specialized site 4GamerIn just one month this has already affected video game companies in Korea, since these types of titles are very common and popular in that country. It should be noted that several bills have been presented to implement measures like this for a long time. Specifically, they began around 2015, when several mobile video games with these types of mechanics became popular throughout the continent.
What does this law dictate? Basically, it forces companies to not only specify more clearly that their video games have a gacha system, but they must disclose the precise possibilities of obtaining each item or character, either within the game or on their official sites. This has been a controversial topic in the past, as there have been issues with this in Korea, in situations where the math of the numbers of certain items released by companies did not match the frequency with which players obtained them in the gacha.
If they do not comply, they may receive several corrections from the Games Administration and Classification Committee (CRAC) and several offenses in a row could lead companies to pay fines of up to 20 million won. According to the Korean government, its goal is «restore trust through proactive responses», which is a good reason to control these multi-billion dollar companies in a way that benefits users. Some of the titles that were affected by this measure include: Ragnarok Online, MU Archangel, Night Crows, PUBG Mobileand many more.
Although this happened in South Korea, gamers from Japan They have responded to these measures in an interesting way. Some striking comments from the site Yaraon Blog They say things like: “Really? Let’s do it in Japan too », «Only in South Korea? In Japan you have to die trying to do it.”, “Let’s also regulate gacha” and “People who still spend money on paid porridge seem to have brain damage.” This shows that gacha mechanics are something that is affecting several countries and regulations like these only favor people.
China had already implemented a similar law and now it was South Korea’s turn. Perhaps this will lead to the creation of a similar law in Japan. What do you think of all this? Do you think a law like this should be implemented in your country?
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