Significance of Age Verification in the Gaming Industry

Posted on the 18 October 2019 by Techpcbuzz

Age verification: In the United States, the video game market was estimated to be around $17.69 billion in 2016. The global market was estimated to be $75 billion the same year, which is expected to grow with the revenue of $94 billion by 2024. This rapid growth is due to a combination of various factors that contribute to it. One most obvious reason is the digitization era that is emerging with ever-evolving technologies and innovations. This advanced world demands a revolution in every industry, among which the gaming industry is also one. The graphical interfaces and entertainment ease with high internet speed is attractive for people of every age.

With the advent of the gaming industry, the challenges are also rising. The increasing traffic is if on one side exciting for the business owners, on the other hand, it is alarming for them to cater to the security and privacy-related issues simultaneously with equal devotion. Smartphones and other digital devices are used for gaming purposes and hence the chances of unauthorized users increase. Acknowledging the obvious growth in the next few years, beneficial owners need to take into account stringent actions that solely contribute to the safety of online users as well as the industry.

The gaming industry is prone to a plethora of attacks. These include several cyberattacks, illegal activities, and unauthorized access. The gaming industry has become a source of endless opportunities for fraudsters, money launderers, terrorist financing, identity thieves, under-age users, and gamblers. To keep this industry safe from such evil actors, there is a dire need for security measures. Globally acceptable and embraced method is electronic Know Your Customer (KYC). Identity verification has become a need for each industry operating online. To secure industry, one should know the traffic. This will help to avoid certain regulatory penalties while complying with them and providing users a safe platform.

Know Your Players (KYP)

Regulatory authorities around the world are active to conduct scrutiny among industries. The organizations operating online with huge traffic are prone to a bunch of cyberattacks that adversely affect the organization and its reputation. Local regulators are fulfilling the purpose of securing community and their data from data breaches which give birth to a large number of fraudulent activities. Each industry should take in place its own KYC and AML processes to avoid back actors from being facilitated through their industry.

Know Your Customer is intended to make sure that an honest entity is becoming part of your system. For this, online identity verification is crucially important. It conducts online age verification, document verification, face verification, biometric authentication and credit card verification. This ensures that no bad actor is exploiting weaknesses in your system to use is for performing malevolent transactions.

Online Age Verification

Online age verification process

Age verification is crucially important for the gaming industry. The reason is that minors try to access gaming assets and video games that are supposed to be solely for adults. The freehand is due to lack of age verification in online platforms to avoid under-age communities form getting this stuff. Here when regulatory scrutiny becomes active, the industry could be in hot water. Also, many industries are now taking into account online age verification to combat the risks of minors from accessing games online for a longer period or accessing adult stuff (gambling).

Tencent has recently adopted online age verification in its gaming industry to restrict the time of gaming for children. Children under 13 are supposed to play online games for one hour a day. The health effects and a lot of gaming ahs enforced Tencent to be careful and every time a user age is identified to restrict the services respectively.