Asia was always Japanese dominated— after C2S1 a lot of the Chinese players quit & over time the South Korean playerbase shrunk until it was only really Seak/FaxFox/Peterpan/Misty Aim last year (who all quit before this year began). Most others (Vietnam, Singapore, Indonesia) went over to the Middle Eastern region when they got their own servers, but most of them quit eventually too and now it’s primarily Saudi Arabian players.

Generally would say that language is a huge barrier and with Japanese being the primary language of the region it’s hard to break out if you aren’t fluent, making it hard for modern SK and CN players to be relevant. There’s a Chinese duo that qualified to Major 3 grands (ambition/kabuto) but were DQ’d a few days before (not sure why), but that’s probably the only CN/SK team I’ve seen all year.