Internet Cafés Vanish

Internet cafés where young people typically spend hours at a time playing online games here, have dwindled from a peak of over 20,000 in early millennium to less than 9,000 last year.

According to Statistics Korea, they dwindled from 21,547 in 2009 to 8,996 in July last year.

"Teens and 20-somethings got used to playing games on their mobile devices in lockdown instead of gathering together in one place to play," it said Tuesday.

According to the Seoul Institute, 9.2 percent of Internet cafés shut down across the country during the COVID pandemic.

"Another reason is that no new megahit games like 'StarCraft' and 'Lineage' that led the golden age of Internet cafés have been released recently," an industry insider said.