that has nothing to do with staffing. Korea has a uniquely hostile ISP market where service providers want to charge foreign services ridiculous amounts (versus peering agreements in most markets) for access to Korean consumer networks
Korea has a philosophy of local conglomerates first and foreign companies only existing if they prop the local conglomerate up.
It's a very good strategy as the Korean market is lucrative and the Korean companies have opportunities to spread worldwide. (they just suck at it)
Twitch got sent a foreigner-tax and didn't pay it, that's all. Korea already has a thriving version of Twitch called AfreecaTV. (edit: Oh it's not that thriving on their international site, maybe Korean site is better.)
>Korea has a philosophy of local conglomerates first and foreign companies only existing if they prop the local conglomerate up.
I don't doubt that there is some degree of domestic favoratism—it would be surprising if there weren't any—but Korea was for years the last bastion of Internet Explorer because of government requirements, as opposed to Chrome, Firefox, or some special Korea-reskinned Chromium. iPhone has lots of market share despite Samsung.[1] Relevant to this discussion, Korean players going back to Starcraft a quarter century ago were and are well known for competing in and livestreaming mostly non Korean-developed videogames.
[1] Yes, I know about Apple being a Samsung customer
No, they really just suck at it as a culture. Tech in Korea is terrible and startups are even worse. The culture may be set by this big players though, that's for sure. It's not about competition leading to this. This is just a "grab" based on the great success of international market trade from Korean companies like Samsung, LG, etc. The same way Facebook and others call Chinese tech terrorism, they earned the privilege locally to hinder competition.
Korea changed the pricing model for network traffic to be "sending party pays". For something like OGN that has a literal TV channel it's less of an issue, but for something like twitch that is only Internet, and tons of video, it's more difficult.
(Like are the layoffs usually accompanied by them reducing the streamer's revenue share, or things like that?)