Squid Game Between Global OTT Services

This chapter has two interactive themes. First, it explores the Korean cultural themes and awards of Squid Game (2021), now a major example of the global Korean Wave. Second, it explores the growth of all global OTT services from 2007, and asks why eventually the Korean Squid Game was funded by the American OTT global streaming service Netflix, instead of by a Korean production company. This is arguably because of censorship of the script idea of Squid Game for over ten years in the Korean culture. Equally, it is argued that increased global competition for content and subscribers between many global OTT online streaming services from 2019 started to occur to make a real world ‘squid game,’ or ‘quid game’ (money game) in the year that Netflix started to fund production of Squid Game carte blanche: without limitations on budget, without editor privileges to censor content, or without limitations on length. Squid Game eventually ran to 9 episodes, and it was in production for almost two years between 2019 to 2021. It was released exclusively on Netflix in September 2021. However, the action series drama now has earned Netflix approximately $900 million dollars from Netflix's still large $21.4 million dollar investment. By contract the producer gets nothing of these profits, except the earlier payment. Netflix owns everything and profits from everything, forever. In retrospect, before 2019, Netflix nearly dominated global OTT services, as it was the first global OTT service to have over 200 million global subscribers in 2017. Worldwide, national lockdowns aided the markets of online streaming services as well between 2020 to 2023. However, after 2019, global OTT broadcaster options are growing. A growing global digital OTT competition among online streaming services is a ‘quid game’ from 2019 that generates eye-wateringly huge and exorbitantly expensive battles for global Korean Wave content and for content ownership in general. Competition is becoming fierce between them to make their own exclusive self-produced intellectual property as content for viewing on their own global digital platforms. Plus, after 2022, global OTT services start to have more market competition for entertainment beyond home viewing of streaming services as lockdown policies subside globally. Thus, from 2022 onward, as Netflix’s global top position started to be challenged by a building ‘perfect storm’ of different factors, both globally from other OTT services and within Korea from other Korean OTT services, that helps to explain Netflix’s exorbitantly generous contracts for production budgets worldwide and for the Korean Wave specifically—as long as Netflix owns everything later. From that kind of devil’s bargain for fame, equally, all the nations of the world start to be challenged. Nations are losing censorship capacities and cultural direction in their own countries, and losing who makes or owns their high-budget cultural artifacts due to who funds their national artists and under what conditions they accept. Because national artists sell their soul, the long term implication is how nations as a whole start to lose who funds or owns their own visual culture or start to lose control of who really impinges upon their own visual culture from these external global OTT services, unless a nation bans them all. A handful of countries do ban Netflix in the interest of national cultural preservation and other economic issues, though no country bans all OTT services so far. Therefore, the wider question is who in the future gets to fund another nation’s culture and for what purposes and under what conditions, and what will be the effect on all past national cultural reproduction, whether in Korea or in any nation?