The infamous “Gacha” is plaguing the modern mobile gaming industry and recently South Korea decided to take matters into its own hands. In case you didn’t know, this is a mechanic that has been implemented in all kinds of games for years now, where a player can pay real money for the chance to get 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 the 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 4Gamer, in just one month this has already affected video game companies in Korea, since this type of titles are very common and popular in that country. It should be noted that several bills have been filed for measures like this to be implemented for a long time. Specifically, they started around 2015, when several mobile video games with this type 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 also disclose the precise possibilities of getting each item or character, either within the game or on their official sites. This has been a controversial issue in the past, as there have been problems with this in Korea, in situations where the mathematics of the numbers of certain items published by the companies did not match the frequency at which players got them in the gacha.
If they fail to comply, they may receive several corrections from the Gaming Classification and Administration Committee (CRAC) and several offenses in a row could lead to companies paying fines of up to 20 million won. According to the Korean government, its goal is to “restore trust through proactive responses,” which is a good reason to monitor 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 Mobile, and many more.
Although this happened in South Korea, gamers in Japan have responded to these measures in interesting ways. Some eye-catching comments on the Yaraon Blog site say things like, “Really? Let’s do it in Japan too”, “Only in South Korea? They must be dying in Japan for trying to do it,” “Let’s regulate gacha too,” and “People who still spend money on paid gacha seem to be brain-damaged.” 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. Maybe this will lead to the creation of a similar law in Japan. What do you think about all this? Do you think a law like this should be implemented in your country?
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