Streaming site Twitch has hit its Korean community with a whirlwind of bad news.
Twitch will shut down in South Korea on Feb. 27 next year, CEO Dan Clancy wrote in a blog post on Tuesday (Dec. 5). “Ultimately, the cost to operate Twitch in Korea is prohibitively expensive,” he wrote, adding that network fees in the country are our “still 10 times more expensive than in most other countries.”
South Korea has a thriving community of gamers and streamers that draw millions of eyeballs on Twitch both within the country and abroad. Yummy_2, a Twitch streamer with 30,000 followers—mostly English-speaking—proclaimed she lost her job and career, and hosted an emergency livestream to try to divert followers to her YouTube channel after the news broke. She and many others will now have to seek out alternatives.
So far, the Amazon-owned streamer’s rules have barred them from providing links, or otherwise directing their Twitch community, to other platforms. But now, Twitch will aid the streamers in doing exactly that, and many who migrated to Twitch from Afreeca or YouTube will find themselves back on those platforms.
“We will work to help Twitch streamers in Korea move their communities to alternative livestreaming services in Korea,” Clancy wrote. “We are also reaching out to several of these services to help with the transition and will communicate with impacted streamers as those discussions progress.”
A brief explanation of high network fees in South Korea
In 2016, South Korea introduced the Sending Party Network Pays (SPNP) law, informally called an internet traffic tax. Initially, internet service providers (ISPs) had to pay each other, and then it was extended to big internet companies. Basically, the party sending traffic over the Internet to an end user (think Netflix or Spotify) is obliged to pay a fee to the telco the user is using for traffic to actually be delivered.
The problem has persisted for years. Cloudflare talked about it in 2016. YouTube owner Google, together with Netflix, contested the law last year. Meta argued against the “harms of network fees” in South Korea this May.
The most prominent public sparring has been between regulators and Netflix. In 2020, Netflix took the issue to South Korean court and argued that it had no obligation to pay or negotiate for the use of SK Broadband’s network when it already charges the user. In July 2021, the court rejected the argument but left payment terms to the parties. At the time, Netflix said it was at a “Red Light-Green Light” crossroads—a reference from its blockbuster hit Korean show Squid Game—and appealed the decision. This September, the two sides called off the legal battle.
A non-exhaustive list of how Twitch tried to save costs in Korea
📺 For over a year now, Twitch has throttled source quality to a maximum of 720p to cut costs.
🔗 Since July 2022, Twitch started testing a peer-to-peer model for source quality as a workaround to offer full HD streaming in 1080p. That requires the IP addresses of all users to be shared, however, therefore increasing the threat of a cyberattack.
A brief timeline of Twitch’s Korea shutdown
Dec. 6, 2023: Twitch decides to shut down and stops letting users select Korea as their country of residence during onboarding. The move doesn’t affect only Koreans. “Streamers outside Korea may experience a change in revenue if they receive significant support from users in Korea,” Twitch warns on its help page.
Feb. 27, 2024: Streamers who have selected Korea as their onboarding country will no longer be able to monetize through Twitch products and viewers won’t be able to make purchases on the platform.
March 16, 2024: Streamers who have selected Korea as their country of residence during onboarding will receive their final payout.
March 27: The last date for users outside Korea to request refunds on qualifying active subscriptions—single and multi-month—for channels belonging to streamers whose onboarding countries are set to Korea
June 4, 2024: Affiliates and Partners in Korea will be offboarded from Twitch.
Quotable: Will Korean Twitch streamers move abroad?
“My heart breaks for many of the Korean creators who managed to find so much success on this platform and the communities they built. While some will likely be okay after switching to YouTube or back to Afreeca or something else, this is still so scary for them. Twitch Korea did such a phenomenal job when it came in to the country years ago where Afreeca was dominating hard. I actually wonder if some of the big Korean creators [will] do what happened to .... Poker players on April 15th, 2011. Some of the Mega creators could probably move to Japan, Thailand, Hong Kong, etc and just stream/live from there. This would be similar to how USA online poker players moved to Canada/Mexico to keep playing online after ‘Poker Black Friday.’”
—Nick De Cesare, also known as LS, who has been part of the Korean gaming community for over 10 years, starting with StarCraft and transitioning to League of Legends. He has almost 660,000 followers on Twitch and 348,000 on YouTube.