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By Cho Jin-seo
Staff Reporter
Making money by playing ``Lineage'' won't be as easy as it is now, as the government plans to punish online traders that manage the profit-driven trading of online game items and game currencies into real money from next week.
The determined, but yet vague announcement was made by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism on Tuesday. It said the government will prohibit the trading of cyber items by ``unfair'' and ``illegal'' ways from next week to ``promote'' the healthy growth of the game industry.
Naturally, the announcement led to lukewarm responses and sneers from the game industry, which believes that such regulations will not only hinder the growth of the prospering businesses but also violate the right of consumers.
``We believe it will be practically difficult for the government to punish or ban such trade,'' said an official of the Association of Digital Asset Trade Promotion, an interest group of the item trading firms. ``There is no clear definition of `unfairness' anywhere in the regulation. Plus, how can they separate illegal deals from legal deals when there are millions of them?''
Like the phenomenal success of ``Second Life'' in the United States, South Korea has several popular online games where hundreds of thousand people form a virtual society. The ``Lineage'' series has been the most popular of them for almost a decade, with more than 50 million users all over the world, and many believe that the success is largely thanks to the prospering of the exchange business.
Eventually, there came numerous online vendors sprawling on the Internet that buy, sell and auction game items and game money for real money. For example, a million ``Aden,'' the cyber currency for ``Lineage,'' is traded at around 15,000 won.
According to the government-backed Korea Game Development and Promotion Institute, the size of the market is estimated to have reached 1 trillion won, or about $1 billion, last year. Itembay, the leading game item trader in South Korea, backs such a calculation, by saying that items worth 300 billion won had been traded via its Web site in 2005, with roughly 5 percent charged as commission.
A large part of the cyber money and items sold online are believed to be generated from ``workshops,'' the clandestine, untaxed garage businesses that hire dozens or hundreds of gamers. Many of them are also based in China.
Major operators of online games, such as NCsoft, NHN and CJ Internet, say that they are not sure of the government's real intention at this point.
``We don't think the ban will severely damage us, because gamers will find another way to trade,'' an NCsoft official said.
``Was there a single time that the government listened to our voice? We will have to wait and see how they interpret the phrase of the legal ordinance and how to implement it,'' a CJ staff member said.
The ministry admits that it would be practically impossible to hunt down all the transactions by numerous workshops, so it insists the item traders should take the responsibility of filtering good and bad items.
``For example, if you run a real estate agency, you check out whether a property you are about to sell is a legitimate one or not. The same principle should apply to the game item trading,'' a ministry official who is responsible for the policy said.
Trading of virtual items is not South Korea's unique custom. Actually, in the United States, the game firms themselves have been more actively involved in supervising and profiting by the trading, unlike Korean game firms who worry about negative public image of the business. For example, the Linden dollars _ the currency in ``Second Life'' _ can be bought and sold on the game's official exchange site.
The U.S. government is trying to take advantage of the popularity of the ``Second Life'' rather than to regulate it. Several governmental agencies, including the army recruit office, have set up virtual branches there.
indizio@koreatimes.co.kr
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