With a full revision of the Game Industry Promotion Act being pushed ahead, a forum of game experts said the current regulation-centred system should be shifted to one focused on promoting game culture and the industry. It also said web-board game rules, identity verification requirements and how a damage redress centre is run need more detailed supplements.

At an expert forum policy debate on the full revision bill held on April 13, Hwang Seong-gi (황성기), chairman of the Korea Game Policy Self-Regulatory Organisation, defined the core of lawmaker Cho Seung-rae's bill as introducing a dual system that separates arcade games and online games. He said the current system has clear limits in an environment where digital transformation is complete, and assessed the revision as an attempt to resolve at once issues accumulated for nearly 20 years since the law was enacted in 2006. He also noted that the planned change in the law's name reflects an awareness of re-establishing games as cultural content.

He said adjustments are needed on detailed issues. He pointed to web-board games as the most sensitive issue. Under the original revision plan, the ban on providing prizes for online games and rules under Appendix 8 of the enforcement decree could effectively be removed, which could also ease restrictions on web-board games. Hwang said he agreed with the long-term direction, but added that to increase the chances of legislation, lawmakers should consider leaving web-board games as an exception. He added that provisions on identity verification and legal guardian consent, introduced during the debate over the shutdown system, also need to be reviewed as their role has been exhausted after the mandatory shutdown system was abolished in 2022.

Lee Jang-joo (이장주), head of ERAC Digital Culture Research Institute, said the definition and criteria of "game over-immersion" have been legally ambiguous but repeated without verification. He also presented research results that found no clear correlation between parents' anxiety levels and their children's game over-immersion index. Lee said the abolition of the mandatory shutdown system was not so much a case of research leading to institutional change as one in which an external incident served as a trigger, adding that it is difficult to find cases where over-immersion research results were reflected in actual laws and systems.

Lee proposed changing policy language from "preventing and healing game over-immersion" to "supporting balanced game use". He also suggested redesigning the identity verification system to focus on actual risk points such as paid payments, access to adults-only content, and transfers of cash-like value.

Lee Do-kyung (이도경), secretary general of the Korea Youth Foundation, said the damage redress centre is limited to issues involving probabilistic items and does not cover actual harm such as account sanctions, refusal of refunds and inducement of excessive spending. The centre is currently operated through an outsourcing structure centred on dispatched workers, and the contractor is also a game translation and localisation company, raising concerns about expertise. He proposed considering transferring it to the Korea Commercial Arbitration Board, which has coercive power.

On provisions to punish the use of hacks, the forum noted that the revision bill contains only prohibitions and lacks penalty clauses. It said supplements are needed in the process of conducting a combined review of lawmaker Kim Seong-won's bill, which sets administrative fines of up to 200,000 won, and lawmaker Jeon Yong-gi's bill, which sets administrative fines of up to 10 million won. On private servers, it said a compromise could be to design an offence subject to the victim's complaint, leaving room for public intervention while respecting game companies' intentions, as cases have increased in which games whose developers have disappeared or are run by user communities.

Lee said 41 revision bills related to the game law have been introduced in the 22nd National Assembly and 16 have passed. He said that exceeds, in half a term, the pace of the 21st National Assembly, which saw 40 bills introduced over a four-year term.

The forum ultimately showed that while there is consensus on the direction of the full revision bill, the key will be how precisely it is designed in areas where interests diverge, including web-board game regulation, identity verification, damage redress and responses to hacks and private servers. It said that for the declaration to re-establish games as culture to translate into institutions, the balance between deregulation and user protection must be specified at the legislative stage.