February 29th 2024.
Irin-Chan, a popular Twitch streamer from South Korea, found herself facing a looming ban from the platform. Twitch had officially announced its departure from the country, leaving streamers with little time to figure out their next move. As a form of protest, some streamers chose to go out with a bang, showcasing explicit content before the servers went offline.
Twitch, owned by Amazon, had already made significant cuts to its workforce, with 500 jobs being eliminated this year. Now, they were pulling out of South Korea entirely. This gave Korean streamers less than three months to make a decision about their careers before the streaming platform shut down in the country on February 27th.
With the deadline quickly approaching, some streamers decided to leave in a very explicit manner. One streamer, Daeyong2, spent his last moments on Twitch playing a hentai game for his followers, with little censorship. He was promptly banned. Irin-Chan took a different approach, undressing and showing parts of her underwear during a live stream on the same day. It seemed to be a form of protest against Twitch's departure from her country. The clips of these streamers have gone viral on Reddit, with many applauding their bold stance or simply finding it amusing.
Some commenters on Reddit joked about the situation, saying, "If that's the way to go out, alright. More power to them all I say. What are they gonna do? Ban them?" Another user added, "Might as well go out with a bang, literally."
The reason for Twitch's departure from South Korea, according to Twitch CEO Dan Clancy, was due to the high cost of operating in the country. In early December, he stated, "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. 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."
While there are other streaming platforms available in South Korea, it is not an easy task for affected creators to pivot and move their fanbase to a new platform. It could take years to rebuild the same level of support they had on Twitch. For now, though, they have no regrets about going out with a bang.
In the midst of all this news, there are other trending stories in the gaming world. These include a death threat received by streamer Ludwig after a comment from HasanAbi about streaming being harder than real jobs, the switch of popular streamer Pokimane from Twitch to YouTube due to male toxicity, and a streamer who was attacked by a wild deer during a live stream.
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