Could a Trip to South Korea Be in the Future?

Completely tangential to me posting about the S. Korean student we'll be hosting next month, I saw on Kotaku.com today that the South Korean government is about to pump 350 billion worth of their currency (the won) into the South Korean videogame industry.

The government will invest W350 billion in the computer game industry until 2012 and expand exports to W5 trillion a year.

Culture, Sports and Tourism Minster Yu In-chon in a meeting on Wednesday discussing mid- and long-term plans to develop the game industry said the emerging industry had proved to be a future growth engine by accomplishing its billion-dollar export goal for the year 2010 two years early.

Yu promised to draw up 60 projects including a US$200 billion game fund and help the country become one of three countries with the world's largest game industry together with the U.S. and Japan.

This is a nice change from the typical games-related press coming out of South Korea which usually involves an imbalanced twenty-something dying during a days-long marathon session of Lineage II. Now we just have to hope that they use some of that money to create games that people outside of the peninsula actually want to play... and that piracy doesn't do most of them in.