South Korea's Game Rating and Administration Committee (GRAC) graces our news pages a lot. A bizarre amount, actually, and it's because it might be the leakiest organisation of its type on the planet. In the last month alone, the agency's rating process has inadvertently revealed the existence of a Quake 2 Remaster and given countless people hope that something, anything might be happening to free Red Dead Redemption 1 from its Xbox 360 and PS3 prison.
But now it's made the news for a very different reason: PocketGamer.biz (via Niche Gamer) reports that the agency is being taken to task over a corruption scandal that's apparently seen hundreds of millions of won in taxpayers money go missing, and it's only happening because the GRAC made the mistake of angering a legion of anime game fans.
Things kicked off last October, when the GRAC made the fateful decision to ratchet up the age rating on Blue Archive—a mobile, gacha-style anime RPG from Nexon—from 15 to 18. The presence of Blue Archive characters in a state of undress was, apparently, too much for the GRAC, which told Nexon to either raise its game's age limit or alter the offending scenes.
Nexon chose to do both, raising the standard game's age rating to 18 and announcing that a new, more modest version of the game that maintained its 15 rating would come out at some point in the future. That didn't mollify the game's fans, though: 5,489 of them—spearheaded by Korean Democratic party lawmaker Lee Sang-heon—signed a petition in protest, calling for a public audit of the GRAC's work and use of resources.
That audit actually happened, and it published its results at the end of June this year, with the South Korean Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism finding that
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