This morning, I shared with our community in Korea that we’ve made the difficult decision to shut down the Twitch business in Korea on February 27, 2024 KST. We understand that this is extremely disappointing news, and we want to explain why we made this decision and how we are planning to support those impacted.
Ultimately, the cost to operate Twitch in Korea is prohibitively expensive and we have spent significant effort working to reduce these costs so that we could find a way for the Twitch business to remain in Korea.
IIRC, South Korea charges an import tax for foreign media. It’s part of why Korea has become a sort of media powerhouse, with K-pop, K-dramas, K-comics, etc… Those things are much cheaper in SK because they’re all local and aren’t being charged that extra tax. So they’re naturally very popular in SK because they’re much cheaper. Sort of a positive feedback loop where the media is cheaper so people consume more of it, which makes the media popular enough to survive on its own outside of Korea as well.
It’s interesting that it’s still classified as foreign media even if the streamers could be local. Wonder if there’ll be a Korean twitch competitor that comes out of this.
There is AfreecaTV. I don’t think Twitch was a big competitor to them locally in the first place. At least from the little I know about it, so take that with an extra train of salt.
IIRC, South Korea charges an import tax for foreign media. It’s part of why Korea has become a sort of media powerhouse, with K-pop, K-dramas, K-comics, etc… Those things are much cheaper in SK because they’re all local and aren’t being charged that extra tax. So they’re naturally very popular in SK because they’re much cheaper. Sort of a positive feedback loop where the media is cheaper so people consume more of it, which makes the media popular enough to survive on its own outside of Korea as well.
It’s interesting that it’s still classified as foreign media even if the streamers could be local. Wonder if there’ll be a Korean twitch competitor that comes out of this.
There is AfreecaTV. I don’t think Twitch was a big competitor to them locally in the first place. At least from the little I know about it, so take that with an extra train of salt.