The Korean mobile game business has grown so rapidly that it has surpassed the online game industry thanks to the 1 percent of ‘heavy money users’ who pay hundreds to thousands of millions of won to get better items despite the extremely low probability of each month.
However, the Fair-Trade Commission (FTC) fined the company’s probability-based items, saying that it had ‘deceived its users’.
Although the items that can be acquired in Sudden Attack can be obtained with different probabilities, the FTC sanctioned the gaming company because it labeled the items ‘randomly given’.
It was revealed that some companies offered items with an extremely low probability of less than 0.008 percent. However, the gaming companies only marked it as being less than 1 percent. Furthermore, these companies tricked its users by providing events with a five-fold increase in probability.
It turns out that the probability-based items sold by the gaming companies have been deceiving gamers, just as it was suspected. Hence, the lack of faith in the gaming company’s probability-based items business.
The gaming industry has been given the chance for self-reform since 2015, when a potential item controversy was raised. Political circles have also made many moves to enact related laws to regulate such issues. However, others countered that taking the gaming companies’ business to court could hurt the industry’s development.
Things are different now. Recently, the gaming industry has announced a second self-regulating plan with the goal of revealing the probability of individual items. However, the majority opinion regarding the self-regulation plan is that it will likely fail. Given these considerations, how long the gaming industry will continue with the probability-based item business is a mystery.
