No, Silence and Maybe: What Korea's 2025 Presidential Candidates Said About Play-to-Earn

Game policy rarely decides a Korean election, but it does show up. In the final days of the June 2025 presidential race, one niche question got its own campaign coverage: should Koreans finally be allowed to play blockchain play-to-earn (P2E) games at home?

A Blockmedia survey published on 31 May 2025, three days before the vote, laid out the three main camps. The answers ranged from a firm no to a conditional yes. With hindsight, they also explain why the bill that now matters most for P2E came from the side that said no.

The three answers

• Democratic Party (Lee Jae-myung): no. Hwang Hee-doo, head of the party's game special committee, said internal debate had concluded against P2E. Committee vice chair Jo Seung-rae said the official position was still opposition.
• People Power Party (Kim Moon-soo): silence. Kim emphasised general deregulation of the game industry, but his official pledge book did not mention blockchain or NFTs.
• Reform Party (Lee Jun-seok): maybe. He was the most open, proposing to allow P2E models that reward creation and contributions to a game's ecosystem rather than gambling, and to reshape the regulatory framework to match.

The backdrop

The survey came, as it happens, at a moment when Korean blockchain gaming was visibly moving abroad. Nexon had launched MapleStory N for global markets and said it had no plans for a Korean release. Neowiz had decided in April 2025 to shut down its Intella X blockchain platform, citing falling token trading and a poor outlook. Industry voices argued that refusing to rate P2E games was excessive regulation, since ordinary game items already carry cash value on outside markets.

Academics pushed a different framing. Kim Jung-tae of Dongyang University argued that blockchain games should be seen through ownership, because players gain real rights over their in-game assets.

What happened next

Lee Jae-myung won the June 2025 election. Three months later, in September 2025, Jo Seung-rae, the same lawmaker who had restated the party's opposition in May, proposed a full rewrite of the Game Industry Promotion Act. The bill is not a P2E bill. But by limiting the ban on gambling-style prizes to arcade-type games, it would weaken the main legal tool that has kept P2E out of Korea (what the bill does).

That has produced an unusual political picture. The governing party's position on P2E remains opposition, but its flagship game bill has been criticised, including by the culture ministry, for potentially opening a gap for online P2E. The ministry called the key clause "unacceptable".

Why it matters

The 2025 campaign confirmed that no major party wants to be seen "legalising P2E". The change, if it comes, is more likely to arrive as part of a broader modernisation of game law, with token games handled in the details. For players, that means watching committee amendments rather than campaign promises.

WGC's take: The most open candidate on P2E did not win, and the winner's party said no. Yet the P2E debate is livelier in late 2026 than it was during the campaign. In Korean game policy, the fine print of a full-length bill can matter more than any slogan (Korea's P2E ban explained).