Twitch officially ceased operations in South Korea on February 27th; the company shut down local servers and revoked partnership programs for all local streamers. South Korean content creators had about two months to transition to new platforms, but some remained on Twitch until the very end. Streams Charts reveals how the statistics of the Korean live streaming segment changed in the days before and after the company's departure.
South Korean streams generated around 1 million Hours Watched daily in the final days before Twitch's closure in Korea. On the last day, February 26th, this figure grew to 1.4 million HW — all due to a mass flash mob organized by Korean content creators, the essence of which was to ignore the platform's rules. For instance, they played adult-rated games, showcased sexual content, or explicit cosplay.
The number of active channels also increased on the last day. In just one day, there was a jump from 8 to 12K channels — Twitch even outpaced both AfreecaTV and the new platform CHZZK that day. The growth was partly due to the flash mob, but many streamers also just conducted broadcasts to pay tribute to Twitch before its closure. In contrast, others took the opportunity to remind their viewers one last time about transitioning to other platforms. By February 28th, the number of Korean channels on Twitch had decreased to 3.6K.
On the day of the closure of Korean Twitch, there were no significant fluctuations in metrics on other platforms. There was a slight decrease in watch time on CHZZK, but the metrics began to rise again on the following day — it is evident that some former Twitch streamers have transitioned to the new platform.
As for the number of unique channels, CHZZK showed significant growth on the day Twitch departed — the number of channels increased from 9K to 12K. However, the situation on AfreecaTV remained almost unchanged. It's difficult to determine which platform became the main beneficiary after Twitch departed from South Korea, especially considering that content creators conduct multi-streams on multiple platforms.
It's important to note that Twitch's departure from South Korea doesn't mean the platform has completely lost Korean streamers. Their numbers have decreased by approximately 60% — all the most popular Korean content creators have left the platform, but many others still have channels that gather 2-3k viewers; among these are nnabi, box930205, siru_cos27, and others.
