Neople fired an employee for playing Dungeon Fighter and doing RMT during work hours. This is what the Korean media reported MTN Reference their sources.
According to the publication, the employee was associated with the development of Dungeon Fighter and played the game for long hours during work hours, earning items and other in-game value that he then sold to other players for real money. In this case, we’re not talking about using administrative powers to create objects.
Neople deemed the violations serious enough to warrant dismissal. In addition to the facts of the transactions, the company also took into account chronic gambling during working hours, the large number and value of transactions, and abuses related to recording working hours.
The official reason for dismissal given by the company was “violation of internal company regulations, including conducting irrelevant activities during working hours, exchanging in-game assets for real currency, and improper control of data exports.”
It is worth noting that Korean game companies generally prohibit employees from trading items and currencies in their own games for real money. This is because developers may have access to information about future updates and other changes, so such transactions create the risk that proprietary information may be used for personal gain. Employees are also prohibited from participating in certain in-game activities, such as sweepstakes.
For Neople, this is not the first case of violations by its own employees. Previously, the company faced the so-called “Gundengiman case,” in which employees with administrative rights created valuable items and sold them, bypassing normal game mechanics. As a result, multiple employees, including then-DNF director Kang Jung-ho, were disciplined.
Subsequently, similar incidents occurred on the global servers of “Dungeon and Fighter”. In this case, the employee also uses administrative privileges to build and sell in-game items. According to MTN, he earned approximately 4 billion won (approximately $2.9 million) by selling items, and later purchased cryptocurrency, gold bars, Jeju real estate worth approximately 480 million won, and expensive cars. The court sentenced him to seven years in prison and confiscated property and funds worth more than 2 billion won.
