[Feedback] Region Gateway problem in Korea

Hello GGG,

I’m writing this as both a long-time Path of Exile fan and a QualityAssurance Engineer currently working in the CA,US based global game company.
I’ve been closely following the technical milestones of the PoE series, and I want to highlight a regional bottleneck that’s preventing the Korean community from accessing the native macOS builds we’ve all been waiting for.

A quick note on my profile: You may noticed this account has no character history. This is because the South Korean player base is strictly siloed within the Kakao Games (Daum Games) ecosystem.
We cannot link our regional accounts to global forums. :(

We’ve seen how well PoE runs natively on Apple Silicon, and with PoE 2’s development progressing, the expectation for a native Mac experience is higher than ever.
However, there is a major "launcher wall" for us.
Even though POE provides native macOS support(I assume POE2 would be under development), the Korean publisher (Kakao Games) still only offers a Windows-only launcher.
This forces Korean Mac users to rely on unstable Wine/VM workarounds.

There’s a common misconception that Korea is exclusively a Windows-PC market. However, we are seeing a significant emerging market for Mac gaming.
A prime example is Pearl Abyss’s Crimson Desert, which launched last month with full macOS support on day one.
This move by a major local developer proves that a growing segment of Korean gamers moving toward the Mac gaming.

The demand to play natively is so high that the Korean community is already using unofficial scripts to bypass regional launcher restrictions. Whether it's for the Steam Deck or macOS, players are reverse-engineering ways to extract authentication tokens from the Windows launcher just to inject them into the standalone client (using community tools like Poe2Deck).

While these workarounds show how much we love the game, they aren't ideal for security or long-term stability.
As a QE, I believe there is a better way to handle this.

I understand that publishing contracts with regional partners can be complicated. Rather than asking for a brand-new launcher from the publisher, I’m asking GGG to consider a more streamlined technical solution within the global launcher to support these users.

Official Token/CLI Support: Since the community is already using token injection, providing an official way to pass an authentication token via launch arguments (e.g., --kakao-auth=[token]) would allow us to use the native Mac builds safely and officially.

Authentication Bridge: An official, lightweight way to handle the regional login (perhaps via a web-view) that hands off the session to the native client would solve this access issue for both macOS and Linux/Steam Deck users in Korea.

As POE2 continues to evolve, it would be a shame for the Korean Mac-POE gamers to be sidelined simply due to regional launcher limitations.
GGG has already put so much effort into native support, and we’d be incredibly grateful for a legitimate 'bridge' that allows us to finally experience the game natively alongside the rest of the global community.

I'd love to hear if the team has considered any official ways to address these regional access hurdles on the roadmap.

Stay Sane, Exiles.

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babymiles77#1231 wrote:

(e.g., --kakao-auth=[token])

The problem with this is that it is a bit... blatant.

GGG's contact presumably offers Kakao Games / Daum Games exclusivity in that market; if GGG subsequently implements something that solely exists to bypass such exclusivity then they face a lawsuit - one they have essentially no chance of winning.

Until or unless their partnership comes to an end, GGG would almost certainly need plausible deniability - for example, if they rolled out a brand new account system to support 2FA phone applications and the like, and the new system just so happened to """accidentally""" fail to properly block Korean players from using the global servers' standalone client, then GGG could argue they're pursuing legitimate business interests which aren't a violation of the partnership.

throwaway account.....

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neohongkong#0222 wrote:

throwaway account.....

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babymiles77#1231 wrote:

A quick note on my profile: You may noticed this account has no character history. This is because the South Korean player base is strictly siloed within the Kakao Games (Daum Games) ecosystem.
We cannot link our regional accounts to global forums. :(

Sarno#0493, certainly quite a few Korean post in the forum that also have character in their profile, and complaining Korean realm. Tell me how they do that then

"

neohongkong#0222 wrote:

Sarno#0493, certainly quite a few Korean post in the forum that also have character in their profile, and complaining Korean realm. Tell me how they do that then

You could have known that yourself; if you didn't, you could have checked yourself.

I don't know who you think you are - but it isn't other people's job to play the game on the international servers for X hours to earn your approval when their post has literally nothing whatsoever to do with their in-game characters; nor is it my job to explain to you that there are almost certainly people in South Korea using VPNs to play on the international servers.

Your next post in this thread will be the third one. Do you plan on reading the OP and engaging with what they've said - for the first time - or are you just going to continue to derail the discussion and talk about random nonsense instead? For someone who's so quick to dismiss the forum posts written by other people, your own posts are nothing to be proud of.

@Sarno#0493,

That's a fair point, but I think it conflates two things.

I'm not asking GGG to bypass Kakao.
Instead, I'm asking them to expose the same `--kakao [token]` argument that already exists in the Windows KG executable on a future Mac client. Every auth handshake still goes through Kakao's servers.
Kakao remains the gatekeeper.
That's parity, not circumvention.

And this gap isn't hypothetical.
It already exists on PlayStation.
Korean players can't log in with Kakao accounts on PS5, and POE1 wasn't even on the Korean PSN store.

Same pattern.
GGG ships a new platform, Kakao's auth layer doesn't follow, Korean players fall through the "cracks".
No lawsuit happened.
Which suggests Kakao's contract covers the authentication mechanism, not platform exclusivity wholesale.

If anything, the legal pressure runs the other way, Kakao holds Korean service rights and is leaving Korean console and Mac users unserved. That's their lost revenue too.

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@neohongkong#0222,
As for the throwaway account which is fair skepticism.
I created this account specifically to post this, because my main account is linked to Kakao Korean realm.

It's like a Galápagos Islands.
That Korean forum is under Kakao's management.
Not GGG.
That is why I came here.