A few days ago, we posted that Korea is to adopt an amendment to ban in-game currency trade. However, for a country which has always been giving great support to the gaming industry, Korea must know well that the adoption of this amendment will exert some impact on its gaming industry, unless there exist some special reasons, for example in order to restrict the growing of some games, like World of Warcraft which only allows in-game currency trade.

Now, let¡¯s have a look at what the amendment contains. First, to prohibit the exchange of in-game currency for real cash and in-game currency brokerage; second, the exchange  of in-game items for real cash will not be prohibited; third, in-game currency trade websites operated on servers set up in an overseas country will be beyond the control of the amendment. Many gamers may wonder, why Korea is going to create such an amendment which is full of holes? It can raise tax on in-game currency trade to increase the country¡¯s revenue or impose a heavy tax on in-game currency trade to restrain it. There is not need to prohibit it completely. In addition, we all know to gamers, in-game items are far more important than in-game currencies and what they would trade in a large amount is in-game item, but not in-game currency. So, we may conceive that the amendment is targeting at some particular games, though, of course not NCsoft¡¯s Lineage 2 and YNK¡¯s Rohan.

Blizzard has been making every effort to prohibit and punish gold farmers, so from some point, this amendment is in line with Blizzard¡¯s ideas. However, blizzard doesn¡¯t prohibit gold farmers from playing WoW for five years, while the amendment stipulates that any found in-game currency brokerage behavior will earn the operator a maximum of five year imprisonment or a fine of less than 50 million won (approximately ?60,000 ). Currently, the amendment is still being drafted. If in the future, the amendment is adopted, it may exert some impact on WoW¡¯s sales in Korea.