Twitch stops operating in Korea due to “excessively expensive” costs 2023

Twitch announced its decision to abruptly cease operations in South Korea, citing “extremely expensive” costs as the driving force.

Twitch, the popular streaming service run by Amazon, will shut down its services in South Korea on February 27, 2024, the company has confirmed.

Twitch CEO Dan Clancy explained in a detailed blog post that the platform allegedly incurs “prohibitive” high operating costs when operating in the Korean market.

And now, Twitch has made the “very difficult decision” to shut down all operations in the region.

“Twitch has been operating in South Korea at a significant loss,” Clancy stated on the blog. “Our network fees in Korea are still 10 times more expensive than in most other countries.”

Clancy noted that despite efforts to reduce costs, including testing a peer-to-peer model and limiting source quality to 720p, the financial challenges appear to have proven insurmountable.

Twitch’s closure would mark a significant change in South Korea’s streaming landscape, where Twitch has been a major player.

“To all of our global community, we want to be clear that this is a unique situation,” Clancy emphasized, while acknowledging the unique challenges South Korea faces compared to other countries. other market.

With this announcement, Clancy also assured that Twitch is committed to supporting Korean streamers transitioning to other local live streaming services.

“We plan to help these communities find new homes – even if it’s not on Twitch unfortunately,” he said. “We will work to help Twitch streamers in Korea migrate their communities to alternative live streaming services in Korea.”

Clancy has since addressed the affected Korean streamers directly on X (formerly known as Twitter), saying: “I just wanted to send my thoughts to them because I know that this will have a real impact on them.”

Categories: Entertainment
Source: Tekmonk Bio, Make Money Blogging

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