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SOUTH KOREA is the world leader in online games. Eager young nerds from around the world have even been known to move to Seoul to ply their trade as professional gamers. E-sports masters who reach the top in Korea can earn six-figure incomes and find their pictures plastered on the bedroom walls of fans. There are over 1,000 game-making firms in Korea, and more than 19,000 PC-bangs in which the top titles are played. Yet the nascent market for mobile gamesthose played on smartphoneshas not really taken off, despite the fact that 17 million Koreans are proud owners of Android phones, a further 4 million have iPhones and the country is the worlds second biggest consumer of apps overall. The reason is regulation: Korean law requires all computer games to be approved by a Game Review Board prior to release. This is bad enough for regular game developers. But for those who make mobile games, it was an insurmountable barrier. App-based games tend to be short-lived, simple, and very numerous; required fees and approval waiting times made it difficult for small independent developers to prosper. And for Google, whose Android Market is the main way to distribute mobile games, it was a bureaucratic nightmare: the firm did not bother selling such apps in Korea until now. So it was great news for young and promising mobile games industry when the South Korean authorities decided to exempt their wares from the review process: since early last week game addicts have been able to get their mobile fix. For a desperate few, this may have come just in time: legislation banning under-16 year-olds from playing online games between midnight and 6am has just come into effect. | 
