Why: Twitch claims that operating costs have gotten too expensive in Korea due to expensive internet/bandwidth fees, which they claim to be 10 times higher than that of other countries.
People like to mock East Asia for p2w gacha games and China specifically for Internet ID laws.
South Korea had both, at least predating China by half a decade. I bet this was a main issue causing cost to run the platform to spiral. This is likely the same reason why Twitch wouldn't even try to enter the Chinese market, as they'll be required to massage the ToS in the CPC's favour and compete with hellholes such as Bilibili.
About Free-to-play pay-to-win models (microtransactions):
- I believe the first ever game to have this was some American or European text game
- Nexon used this model in their highly grossing game MapleStory
- This model was then adapted by other South Korean game developers, namely the ones behind "CrossFire (CS clone)" and "Dungeon and Fighters"
- This model was imported to China, where Tencent was licensed run CF and DNF in China
- As all things go, the Chinese ramped this model up on drugs, they hired mathematicians and actuarial studies majors instead of game developers. I'm not kidding you, I've been in an interview.
- Arguably, the Japanese then took this model and made it very popular for mobile phone users with weeb waifu husbando gacha games
You have this region of yellow kikes to blame for your shitty video games.
Internet IDs:
- South Korea had an Internet ID system (i-PIN 아이핀) long before China
- China's internet ID systems only came into effect in late 2010s, where you can still just use a fake ID number and lie about your age. The Chinese ID card follows the format of ccccccyyyymmddxxxg
First 6 digits corresponds to place of birth, then year-month-day, xxx corresponds to the number assigned to you.
G corresponds to GENDER. If you're ever doubtful of that Chinese guy's real gender, just check their ID card, last digit even = real woman.
- They didn't start to enforce this gay bullshit until 2018-now.
- Many used friend's ID to play on Korean servers because they had the more recent updates and nicer looking cosmetics
Technically, every single Twitch user needs to have their real identity linked to their accounts. I bet this was so costly to implement, Twitch just gave up.
Anyway, South Korea's local streaming sites are probably better and you probably won't get banned for calling a spade a spade.
