Who Will Police Korea's Games? The Plan to Remake GRAC, and Why It Matters for Crypto

For twenty years, one body has decided whether a game can legally exist in Korea. Since late 2006, a dedicated game rating board, today's Game Rating and Administration Committee (GRAC), has handed out age ratings, cancelled them and, since 2021, kept play-to-earn games off the market. A bill now in the National Assembly would change who that body answers to, and what it does.

The 2025 full rewrite of the Game Industry Promotion Act, proposed by Democratic Party lawmaker Jo Seung-rae in September 2025, would create a new Game Promotion Agency (게임진흥원), place a renamed game management committee under it and move most digital-game ratings to private, self-regulating operators. As of the forums we tracked through August 2026, the bill had not been voted on, and the culture ministry was openly opposing key parts.

What would change

• A new agency. The game field would be split off from the Korea Creative Content Agency (KOCCA) into a dedicated Game Promotion Agency.
• A regulator inside it. GRAC, renamed as a game management committee, would sit under the new agency and focus mainly on arcade-style games.
• Private ratings. Ratings would be split into digital and arcade games, with digital ratings transferred to the private sector.
• Narrower prize rules. The ban on gambling-style prizes would apply only to arcade-style "location-based" games (why that matters for P2E).

The ministry's objection

The Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism (MCST) opposes putting promotion and regulation in one body. According to reporting on a 13 March 2026 seminar, it argues that doing so would create conflicting goals and undermine fairness and independence, and that game promotion should stay integrated with other content fields under KOCCA.

Not everyone agrees. Hwang Seong-gi of Hanyang University, who also chairs the Game Self-Governance Organization of Korea (GSOK), said the risk of regulatory capture was largely theoretical and pointed to publishing as a field where promotion and regulation already sit together. At an August 2026 forum, Hanyang professor Park Jong-hyun said a hybrid model with an agency and a committee could work, but called for a clearer separation of the two functions and a more independent committee.

Why crypto watchers care

For blockchain games, the institutional question is not a side issue. GRAC is the body that cancelled the ratings of Korea's first P2E games, and its judgement was backed by the courts in January 2023 (the cases). Under the bill:

• The regulator would focus mainly on arcade games, while digital games, where P2E lives, move largely to private raters.
• The prize clause GRAC has relied on would no longer cover digital games.

Put together, the main gatekeeper against online token games would have less of a role in exactly the area where those games appear. Lawyer Lee Byung-chan, speaking at the August 2026 forum, welcomed private ratings but said procedures would be needed to catch and correct private raters who miss gambling-like games.

What to watch

The bill must clear the National Assembly's culture committee, where the ministry's objections will be tested. Watch for amendments that keep a public body in charge of gambling-risk checks for digital games, or that add specific rules for token games.

WGC's take: Splitting promotion from KOCCA and modernising ratings are reasonable goals. But Korea has spent five years building a clear, court-tested position on P2E, and much of it rests on GRAC. If the regulator is redesigned, the job of judging token games needs a named owner, not an assumption (Korea's P2E rules).