The Korea Game Awards, which crowns the best title that lit up Korea over the past year, will be held next month in tandem with G-Star. The highest honor at this ceremony is the Presidential Award. And yet, in the past two decades, not once has the President personally presented it.

We call it the Presidential Award as a matter of course, but it wasn’t always so from the beginning. When the Korea Game Awards launched in 1996, the grand prize was the Prime Minister’s Award. As the game industry made rapid strides and its importance was recognized, it was elevated to the Presidential Award in 2003. That was 22 years ago.

Government attention toward the Korea Game Awards has steadily grown. In 2017, the Prime Minister sent a congratulatory video message, adding gravitas to the event. In 2019, the Minister of Culture, Sports and Tourism attended in person and conferred the award on the President’s behalf. I remember seeing members of the industry swell with pride.

We’ve already seen clear signs of presidential interest in the game industry as a whole. The previous administration’s President sent video congratulations to G-Star—Korea’s largest game show—in both 2023 and 2024, underscoring that games are a key engine for exporting K-content.

It’s time to hope the President will attend the Korea Game Awards in person. This wish has nothing to do with political scores; it is about the ultimate symbolism of stature and recognition. If G-Star is the stage that showcases our industry’s standing and economic performance, then the Korea Game Awards is the place reserved for the creators who achieved those results.

Despite contributing close to 70 percent of our content exports and earning substantial foreign currency, Korea’s game industry has long battled social prejudice—labeled as “like drugs,” tarred with a “disease code,” and so on. In that climate, the industry welcomed the President’s recent roundtable remark—“It is not an addictive substance”—with open arms.

If the President were to visit the Korea Game Awards venue and, shaking the hand of the developer who produced the year’s most luminous achievement, personally hand over the Presidential Award—at that moment, it would instill an irreplaceable pride in people in games who have endured social stigma.

On the foundation laid by ministerial attendance and the Prime Minister’s video congratulations—and with the interest the President has already shown through G-Star—we can now cautiously hope for the President’s direct presence.

A Presidential Award delivered by the President. Such a scene would mark a symbolic declaration that puts an end to the old “get rid of the crock because there are many thieves” style of regulation—sweeping, punitive rules that punished the whole because of the misdeeds of a few—and that officially recognizes games as both a genuine export industry and the backbone of cultural industry.

This article was translated from the original that appeared on INVEN.