ONLINE GAMING

The Growth of Online Gaming and its Legal Issue

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Table of Contents

Introduction1

Growth of Online Gaming Industry2

Online Social Gaming Trends4

Online Gaming to Online Gambling6

Legal Issues in Online Gambling6

The Wire Wager Act7

The Travel Act, The Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act, The Interstate Transportation of Wagering Paraphernalia Act, The Federal Aiding and Abetting Statute.8

United States Federal Gambling Laws8

Conclusion9

The Growth of Online Gaming and its Legal Issues

Introduction

The video game industry is exploding worldwide. DFC Intelligence defines the video game and interactive entertainment industry as including console hardware and software, portable hardware and software. PC game software, online game subscription revenue, digital distribution of games and advertising revenue for games are part of video game industry. In 2006, this market passed $30 billion in worldwide revenue and is forecasted to reach about S4 billion by 2012. This will make the video game industry about as large as the global music business where consumers are usually billed in much smaller increments. It may surprise some people to learn that the largest market for online games has been South Korea. With social media, circulation is a crucial and defining measure of meaning and import. A third complicating parameter is introduced by on-line games, for example, MMORPGs (massively multiplayer online role-playing games) in which the texts are extraordinarily dynamic, the social networks are crucial to the substance of the game, and the interactions of players with one another are actually constitutive of the gaming experience.

When it comes to online games, most consumers think of the expensive subscription games like “World of Warcraft”. However, there is growing interest in business models like the ones found in East Asian markets such as China and Korea (Reeves 2009). In a country of 47 million people, a single game, called “Lineage”, has been known to attract as many as two million users in a given month. This is six percent of the country and would be comparable to 18 million people playing a single game in the United States.

The National Geographic Society (NGS) has also set a gaming department on its site for different age groups. Among the most popular games listed in it are “Cosmic Card Challenge”. “Zipper's cave maze”, “Pluto's Secret and Brainteasers”. We will discuss in this paper that, how online gaming moves from LAN to social online gaming and then towards online gambling. There are several legal issued involved that we will focus and discuss current application of established laws.

Growth of Online Gaming Industry

The development of technology makes the game moves towards online gaming, and this certainly depends on the interest and preferences of gamers, but the history of online gaming ebbs and flows from year to year? These are the things we need to understand for lovers of online gaming. Heyday of the first online game, when “Ultima Online”, “EverQuest”, and “Asheron's Call” has no rival. These were the first few successful games that gave inspiration to other companies to start creating their own online ...