Twitch is shutting down in South Korea
Twitch has announced that it will no longer provide its service in South Korea due to high costs in comparison to other regions, despite multiple attempts to reduce the fees.
The details:
Details of the shutdown were revealed in a new blog post, with CEO Dan Clancy stating that the company has "made the difficult decision to shut down the Twitch business in Korea on February 27, 2024 KST" due to considerably higher operating costs in the region.
Clancy went on to say that running Twitch in Korea is still extremely costly, with network fees being “10 times more expensive than in most other countries.” This comes after the company reduced streaming quality to 720p and "experimented with a peer-to-peer model for source quality," both of which reduced costs but were insufficient to offset the "significant loss" from operational expenses.
Toward the end of the post, the CEO stated that Twitch would now be working with streamers and companies to assist its users in transitioning to other streaming sites in Korea with communities built on the platform.
The reason for the costs was not disclosed in the blog post, but it is believed that Korean laws are to blame, as the government requires online services to pay local ISPs for traffic by the gigabyte, resulting in massive costs for sites that use a lot of data, such as Twitch.
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