South Korea Cracks Down On Game Hack Creators

Published: December 6, 2016 12:08 AM /

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south-korea

A new article from PvPLive shows that South Korea has passed an amendment to a law on promoting the gaming industry, that goes after the creators of game hacks, such as aimbots, hacking programs, basically, anything not allowed in the Terms of Service of the game. The new law has now made it illegal to create or distribute hacking programs

The punishment for being found guilty of violating this new law is a maximum of five years in jail or $43,000 in fines (50 million KRW). This new law will make it much easier for game companies to put a stop to people using programs to cheat at their games, as well stop the proliferation of said programs at the source of their creation. This also has potentially good ripple effects for the global video game community since a some of these hacking programs come from South Korea, such as the Korean Pixelbot for Overwatch.

Rather than just inconveniencing the cheaters with having to get a new account, this law gives game companies some real weapons to use against them. It will also help keep online games from getting overrun by cheaters, and keep the player base from dwindling. The new law should act as a deterrent for people who would use hacks to get advantages in online play (at least in South Korea), allowing companies to worry less about banning people using them and spend more time focusing on their games.

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Quick Take

This is a pretty big step forward in keeping hackers from ruining people's favorite games and allows companies to more effectively directly go after the people creating the game hacks, rather than just banning the users. One thing that might become an issue is if this law could be used against things like mods, since technically they could fall under violations of the Terms of Service. Also, some Terms of Service can hide some pretty ridiculous things and this law might make cause issues with some of the more outlandish terms. Hopefully, it never comes to that, but it's only a matter of time before someone makes a mod the game company doesn't approve of and now they could use this new law to go after the creator. 

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Kyle Downey TechRaptor
| Staff Writer

Staff Writer looking to keep you both informed and entertained. Favorite games include: Pokemon, Overwatch, Golden Sun, Portal, and Elder Scrolls.