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.
This’ll probably happen, anyone wanting to watch or stream on Twitch will probably just go through the Japanese servers. But Twitch isn’t that popular in Korea anyways, most of the Korea-based streamers on the platform have large foreign audiences.
Which would be passed to their customers in the form of more expensive VPN price. Either way, the ISPs are the winner here, and I think someone mentioned that it’s practically impossible to create a new ISP due to regulatory capture so there will be no competition to challenge the oligopoly.
Couldn’t Koreans just VPN to another country?
No need. Asian countries are not blocked from using Twitch. It’s just Twitch won’t have local business in Korea now.
VPNs aren’t the solution to shitty laws, nor can you expect that to be a valid mass solution
This’ll probably happen, anyone wanting to watch or stream on Twitch will probably just go through the Japanese servers. But Twitch isn’t that popular in Korea anyways, most of the Korea-based streamers on the platform have large foreign audiences.
What’s funny is Korean VPNs would be paying the fees to the ISPs instead, lol. ISPs still get their money.
Which would be passed to their customers in the form of more expensive VPN price. Either way, the ISPs are the winner here, and I think someone mentioned that it’s practically impossible to create a new ISP due to regulatory capture so there will be no competition to challenge the oligopoly.