[Digital Daily Reporter Lee Hak-beom] The Fair Trade Commission has imposed a fine on Webzen for allegedly providing false information about the probability rates of in-game items to users and concealing this information.
On the 30th, the Fair Trade Commission announced that it had decided to issue a correction order along with a total fine of 158 million won to Webzen for deceitful practices, such as falsely informing or concealing/omitting item acquisition probabilities to consumers in their mobile game service ‘MU Archangel’.
According to the Fair Trade Commission, Webzen sold three types of probability-based items: ‘Set Treasure Draw Ticket’, ‘Festival Roulette Draw Ticket’, and ‘Dragon’s Treasure Draw Ticket’ in MU Archangel. They set conditions where rare items could not be obtained before making a certain number of purchases (at least 51 to at most 150 times per item) but informed users that the acquisition probabilities were between 0.25% and 1.16%.
As a result, MU Archangel users were misled into believing they could obtain rare items from these chance-based items with each purchase.
The Fair Trade Commission pointed out that although Webzen corrected the law violations themselves and took compensatory actions such as partially refunding consumers who purchased the probability-based items, the compensation rate was less than 5% (totaling 860 out of 20,226 affected users), meaning that consumer damages were hardly recovered.
They stated that “unlike other probability-based item electronic commerce law violation cases of other gaming companies addressed this year, we took stringent actions including imposing fines.” Previously, from April to June this year, for violations by four gaming companies (Gravity, Wemade, Krafton, and Com2uS), the Fair Trade Commission considered refund/compensation actions and damage recovery for consumers, leading to only correction orders and fines of 2.5 million won each.
Furthermore, the Fair Trade Commission issued a correction order to Webzen not only to prohibit similar acts in the future but to also prepare and report concrete and effective measures to prevent recurrence of such law violations.
The Fair Trade Commission stated, “We will continue to strengthen monitoring against deceptive practices related to the probability information of in-game items by gaming companies and will impose strict sanctions upon confirmation of law violations. We plan to meticulously enforce the law to ensure effective prevention of recurrence and consumer damage recovery.”
In response, Webzen stated, “We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience caused to users and are continuously processing refund requests on our official community, and we will make efforts to prevent recurrence following the Fair Trade Commission’s decision and recommendations.”