A survey about RMT

October 26th, 2005 Jun Sok Huhh Posted in news |

RMT(Real-money trading) is one of hottest issues of Korean gaming culture in every respect. In a sense, RMT gets beyond gaming issue, it is also a sort of serious social problems. Many game-watchers and experts are arguing about various subjects on RMT and related markets. Until now, no definite solution or plan to mitigate its negative side is drawn. Personally, I feel it urgent that broad and rigorous empirical investigation on RMT and its markets in Korea is to be done. I had a visit to the ItemBay for proposing some co-researches on RMT markets, but their favors could be won just in case that the result was helpful for their business. I felt that they wanted emprical supports for the legalization of RMT . At the time, I felt so disappointed to their narrow standpoint. I guess many times and efforts could be saved if we had more precious outlooks and detail data about RMT.
Anyway, ETnews, a Korean newspaper specialized in IT, had an online survey on RMT in Korea for 4 days. 2,000 men and women over 10 years old were chosen for it. the summary of survey results is following.

1. 85.1% of all respondents was known or heard about RMT, only 14.9% answered “I don’t know it well.“
2. By occupation, 44.4% of students answered “I know it well”, 45.3% answered “I know it roughly.” This proportion is by far higher than the proportion of office workers or housewives.
3. 14.8% of all respondents said that they had experiences in RMT, most of them are younger generation in their teens or twenties. By age, 29.3% of RMT experiencing respondents are in their teens, 19.0% in their twenties, 11.0% in their thirties, 7.5% in their forties, 7.1% from higher ages.
5. By sex, the proportion of male from RMT experiencing respondents is 72.8% which are much higher than that of female, 27.2%.
6. 73.5% of all respondents answered that “RMT is a wrong kind of acts.” Especially, housewives showed more negative opinion on RMT, 87.0% of them viewed RMT wrong. But, 43.0% of teenage respondents answered that “It is all right.”
7. 61.3% of RMT experiencing respondents answered that they put to use professional mediation company like ItemBay in RMT, 19.2% via direct contacts in games, 11.8% via games’ communities on the web. Male respondents preferred mediation company, direct contacts and game’ communities are favored by the female and the older.