Sad news for South Korean Twitch streamers working for the platform, or using the platform for their own needs: the service will be shutting down next year.

According to an official post, Twitch in Korea will be shutting down on 27 February 2024 KST. The big reason is due to cost: it’s expensive to run a big service like Twitch in Korea, especially when the country has other similar services and competitors. Try as the company might, the company cannot afford the high network fee of the country, which just so happens to be a unique problem in the country.

“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. First, we experimented with a peer-to-peer model for source quality. Then, we adjusted source quality to a maximum of 720p. While we have lowered costs from these efforts, our network fees in Korea are still 10 times more expensive than in most other countries. Twitch has been operating in Korea at a significant loss, and unfortunately there is no pathway forward for our business to run more sustainably in that country.

To all of our global communities, we want to make it clear that this is a unique situation. Operating costs in Korea are significantly higher than they are in other countries and we have been open about this challenge for some time.”

This issue is also amplified by the fact that the 2016 amendment to the Korea Telecommunications Business Act (TBA) makes it mandatory for online service companies to take all the costs of traffic in the country (thus penalizing high traffic volume; the bigger the volume of data, the bigger the fee). This is why Netflix in Korea costs more than in other countries; the company is charging more to pay the high network costs due to the mandate. The fact that Korea’s Twitch community is sizable could mean that many will not take this news lying down.