South Korea May Ban Steam

For a country so heavily involved in online gaming, I am surprised to report that South Korea's Department of Video Game Rating Board has expressed the possible action of completely banning Valve's Steam in the country. The claim is that Korea wants every game with Korean language support to have been rated by Korea, including indie and flash games, but this would be quite a feat to accomplish with over 1,000 titles available (even though not all have Korean language support). I can appreciate that a crackdown on unrated games shows that the country is taking responsibility in regulating the industry, but I am suspicious of Korea's intentions; it turns out that the fee charged to rate a game can be thousands of dollars, something smaller developers cannot afford in their budgets. The board is still looking at alternatives to 100% banning Steam, but it is doubtful that Korean gamers will have access to anything near the full library of games and that makes me a sad consumer.

Are We There Yet?

Everyone gets pretty excited about new gaming technology whether it be as simple as shiny new graphics and sound or as futuristic as 3D gaming (although you all know my thoughts on the latter). Sometimes, though, it seems as though hardware developers and manufacturers are getting a little ahead of themselves, so taken with a great idea that the proper QA isn't completed and so a flawed product is introduced. I am at the moment concerned with Kinect, Microsoft's controller-free game device due to come out in North American markets on November 4. Rumors have been circulating that there is a major problem with interference that prevents Kinect gaming from functioning except in the most barren and matte locations (see this comic for details). Microsoft has alarmingly not issued any statements as to how it will deal with the issue. I have the feeling that the developers feel pushed to get this highly hyped product out on time and just deal with any bugs later (oh Microsoft, have you learned nothing from the red ring of death?) but in my opinion, consumers are tired of paying full price for products that are pretty much just the beta versions. Please, Microsoft, fix it and then deliver - we'll wait.