South Korea asks China to stop banning its games

The game licensing freeze coincided with harmful moves against other South Korean businesses starting in 2016, which came after the country agreed to deploy the US anti-ballistic missile system, known as THAAD, on the peninsula.

But with the rancor having subsided some over the last two years, South Korea's Chairman of Foreign Affairs and Unification Committee recently met with China's ambassador to Seoul and requested that China reopen its doors to South Korean games.

For a long time, China has been South Korea's largest export market for games. In 2012, it accounted for more than 38 percent of the country’s domestic game exports. Needless to say, China's blanket ban on any new South Korean game means the country is leaving a lot of money on the table, despite the gaming sector’s continued growth.  

Most notably, it may have impacted one of Tencent's hottest titles, PUBG Mobile, a mobile version of the South Korean PC shooter PUBG. The game had struggled to obtain a monetization license over the past year and a half. As a result, Tencent recently scrapped the PUBG brand in China and replaced the mobile game with a highly patriotic game with all the same gameplay and a monetization license at launch.