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.