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.