South Korea Orders Apple and Google to Remove ‘Play to Earn’ Games

The government of South Korea has told Google and Apple it must remove “play to earn” video games, a rapidly expanding genre driven by the booming crypto economy, from their app stores.

The request was made by the Game Management Committee (GMC) of the South Korean government’s Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism, which is trying to curb speculative cash grabs.

Via Cointelegraph:

The Game Management Committee (GMC) in the Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism on Monday requested major mobile app marketplaces block any games that require in-app purchases before playing the game.

To combat the proliferation of what it sees as speculative money-making schemes, the GMC has made it all but impossible for P2E game developers to get their work listed on the most popular mobile app stores.

While the government’s attempt to mitigate the growth of P2E games by going straight to the app marketplaces is a new development, game developers in South Korea have been facing court battles since April to keep their P2E games up for sale in domestic app stores. The main problem is that some game apps could not obtain an age rating required for listing on app stores.

While not all play-to-earn video games incorporate cryptocurrencies or NFTs, the development of the latter technologies has led to a surge of new play-to-earn titles, with many set to be released in the new year.

NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, are often associated with the sale of digital art, but also be used to identify the ownership of digital assets inside a video game.

In traditional video games such as Runescape and World of Warcraft, assets within the game could be purchased with units of digital currency earned within the game.

While there was no formal link between the in-game currencies and real money in such titles, parallel markets emerged in which in-game currency and items were traded for dollars and other fiat currencies, notably the Venezuelan Bolivar.

Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. He is the author of #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election.