Korea Game Rating Board Targeting Indie Developers

Korea’s Game Rating Board (GRB) is making life difficult for independent Korean game makers, strictly enforcing a law that virtually all games published in the country must be rated.

Posting to Reddit, a Korean game fan indicated that GRB recently swooped down upon a website for users of RPG Maker, a free tool that can be used to create role-playing games. While the games created and shared on the site were apparently not for sale, the GRB demanded that all the games shared on the site must be rated. The forum’s moderators, according to the Reddit user, deleted all the games on their website in light of paying the fees.

The fees for gaining a rating can also be excessive, as the Korean gamer laid out pricing structures for indie-made games to get rated. A basic fee is charged per MB, with multipliers applied for network-related games, as well as for different game types and for localization of the game. The example used showed that a developer of a free Korean RPG, with a size of 105MB, would have to pay approximately $71 in order to receive a rating necessary for “release” of the game.

Similarly, Valve Software’s Steam is now in the firing line of the GRB, as Team Liquid writes that Steam could be banned in Korea, due to the fact that neither the service nor games offered through it have been rated.


Via TigSource

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