Pangyo Techno Valley in Seongnam, just south of Seoul, is an industrial complex being developed as South Korea’s version of Silicon Valley. (Yonhap)
SEOUL, March 14 (Korea Bizwire) — With Yoon Suk-yeol set to be South Korea’s next President, the nation’s video game industry is reacting with mixed expectations and concerns.
During the presidential campaign, Yoon stressed that video games are not diseases, pledging that he would ease regulations to keep abreast with global trends.
Accordingly, the video game industry has high expectations for the new administration.
However, President-elect is taking a prudent approach to the approval of play-to-earn (P2E) games, the biggest issue facing the game industry, over concerns about the side effects, among others, money laundering.
With this in mind, it is difficult to expect him to take active step to improve the system within a short period of time.
Considering that Yoon plans to actively cultivate digital assets like non-fungible tokens (NFTs) that can be used in video games, the system related to blockchain and cryptocurrency technology would likely be improved in advance.
His pledge to upgrade the U.S. Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) anti-missile system is another factor that increases the sense of uneasiness among workers at video game companies.
China suspended the issuance of new licenses for Korean games in 2016 when the dispute over South Korea’s THAAD deployment flared up.
Yoon also pledged to revise the current 52-hour work week policy towards allowing longer work hours on the basis of agreement between business owners and workers.
Employees of video game developers, in particular, who frequently work overtime at night and even worked all night before the introduction of the 52-hour work week policy, are showing a growing sense of uneasiness about the revival of the past practice on Blind, an anonymous community app for the workplace.
Ashley Song (ashley@koreabizwire.com)
