Update: A Microsoft spokesperson has responded to PC Gamer's request for input.
saying "We are proceeding with the worldwide migration of Mojang records to Microsoft represents Minecraft: Java Edition incorporating for our players in South Korea. We're working on a longer-term answer for existing and new players under the age of 19 in South Korea and will have more to share on this in the not-so-distant future."
Original story: Minecraft, the incredibly kid-friendly sandbox game, has basically been hit with a grown-ups just age rating in South Korea.
The bizarre restriction boils down to the country's "Cinderella law," which reassesses any kid or adolescent expecting to mess around with their mates into the early hours of the morning. The law's been set up since 2011 and implies anybody under the age of 16 is prohibited from playing on the web videogames between 12 PM and 6 AM
Rather than bothering to carry out any form of after-hours screening to Xbox Live or separate servers, Microsoft rather changed their approach for South Korea in 2012, so anyone needing to make a record must be something like 19 years old. This hasn't affected Minecraft up until now, as the game's actually been permitting players to sign in with their Mojang account which doesn't require age verification.
That is changed now, with the authority Minecraft site warning players back in December 2020 that they'd need to start marking in with an Xbox Live record to get to the game. The migration started off as something voluntary, yet then, at that point in March, an extra warning sprung up explicitly for South Korea informing that anybody hoping to purchase the game would be somewhere around 19 years old. So while Minecraft currently sits at a 12+ age rating through the country's Games Rating and Administration Committee, the mandatory Xbox Live sign-in knocks that straight up to an 18+ rating.
Understandably, numerous Korean players are pretty annoyed about the entire thing. A request on the government's true site has accrued over 88,000 signatures, requesting South Korea to dispose of the Cinderella law and its inadvertent restriction of Minecraft.
"The law, at last, stretched out to Minecraft, which is regarded as the encapsulation of instructive and creative games," a machine translation of the appeal reads. "Korea will become the just game market where even Minecraft is reduced to a grown-up game."
The request proceeds to guarantee that the curfew law is unnecessary and disregards the advantages games can have on youngsters. Likewise, you know, how simple the law can apparently be to circumvent. Microsoft is yet to respond with a remark about the circumstance.
In more sure Minecraft news, a super-rare version of the game that was up for under four hours was recently discovered on a Twitter user's dusty old hard drive.