The Back Door That Let P2E Into Korea, and Why It Slammed Shut

If Korea bans play-to-earn games, how did one reach number one in the popularity chart? The answer is a feature of Korean law that most players never think about: on mobile, the game regulator usually is not the first to see a game.

Both of the P2E games that ended up in Korean courts, Skypeople's Five Stars for Klaytn and Natris's Muhandolpa Samgukji Reverse, reached players through the app stores' self-rating system. The Game Rating and Administration Committee (GRAC) stepped in only afterwards, cancelling their ratings and pushing them off Google Play and the App Store. The episode explains a lot about how Korean game regulation actually works, and about a fight now coming over who should rate games at all.

How self-rating works

Every game distributed in Korea needs a rating, but GRAC does not review every mobile game itself. For open app markets, Korea created a system in which authorised platforms rate games on GRAC's behalf, with GRAC reviewing afterwards. The idea dates back to a period around 2010, when the flood of smartphone games made one-by-one review impossible and lawmakers worked on rules for open marketplaces built on self-rating and post-review.

It is efficient. It also means a game can be live, downloaded and earning before the regulator looks at it.

How P2E slipped through

Muhandolpa Samgukji Reverse launched in Korea through app-market self-rating, and Korean media called it the country's first P2E game. Players earned the Mudol token through quests and could swap it for a coin listed on exchanges. It briefly topped the popularity chart.

GRAC's post-launch monitoring caught it. On 24 December 2021 GRAC cancelled the rating. The law firm that represented GRAC in the later lawsuit put it bluntly: in GRAC's view, Natris had misused the self-rating system to get around the fact that current law does not allow P2E games to be rated.

Five Stars for Klaytn followed the same path earlier. Skypeople launched it on Google Play and the App Store in 2020; in 2021 GRAC cancelled its self-rating on its own authority, citing gambling concerns, and later rejected a new rating application.

Why the back door closed

After those cases, the route stopped working. Courts confirmed that GRAC can cancel self-ratings for P2E games, and that tokens and NFTs count as gambling-style prizes. A studio can still self-rate a token game through an app store, but it would be launching a game GRAC is very likely to pull, with the courts on GRAC's side.

The next fight: private ratings

The issue is about to get bigger. The 2025 bill to rewrite the game law would split ratings into digital and arcade games and move digital-game ratings to the private sector. Experts at an August 2026 forum broadly welcomed the shift. Lawyer Lee Byung-chan called it a reasonable direction, but said there must be procedures to catch and correct private raters who miss or misjudge gambling-like games, and that the rule requiring content changes to be reported within 24 hours after an update should be rethought, since live online games patch constantly.

The culture ministry is more worried. It has warned that privatising ratings could leave a regulatory gap for gambling-simulating games such as web board games, though industry voices reply that those games would get an adults-only rating anyway (the wider debate).

Why it matters

Self-rating is what made Korea's brief P2E moment possible. If ratings move further into private hands, the question of who catches the next token game becomes even more important.

WGC's take: Self-rating is a sensible system for a world with millions of apps. But Korea's P2E episode shows its weak point: it trusts the first gatekeeper to know what the law forbids. Any move to private ratings needs a clear answer on tokens, or GRAC will be back to chasing games after launch (Korea's rules).