(Bloomberg) – Amazon.com Inc.’s livestreaming site Twitch is poised to cut 35% of its staff, or about 500 workers, according to people familiar with the plans, the latest in a series of job reductions there.
The cuts, which could be announced as soon as Wednesday, come amid concerns over losses at Twitch and after several top executives left the company in the span of a few months. A Twitch spokesperson declined to comment.
Running a large-scale website supporting 1.8 billion hours of live video content a month is enormously expensive, despite Twitch’s reliance on Amazon’s infrastructure, company executives have said. In December, Twitch Chief Executive Officer Dan Clancy said the company would cease operations in South Korea, where the costs are “prohibitively expensive,” according to a blog post he wrote.
Twitch has increased its focus on advertising in recent years. Nine years after Amazon’s acquisition of the company, the business remains unprofitable, according to the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private information.
In the final months of 2023, several top executives announced their departures, including Twitch’s chief product officer, chief customer officer and chief content officer. Twitch also lost its chief revenue officer, who worked on Twitch from within Amazon’s Ads unit.
“It’s always bittersweet when talented leaders move on to pursue new opportunities,’’ a Twitch spokesperson said at the time. “We are incredibly grateful for their contributions to Twitch and our community, and wish them all the best.”
The former employees all declined to comment.
Since he took the position in March 2023, Clancy has been on a cross-country charm offensive to mend relations with the gaming celebrities who make a living streaming on Twitch. Many of them chafed at Twitch’s original approach to ads, which the company reworked after criticism. Streamers have praised Clancy’s desire to listen to their concerns after years of complaints that the service was out of touch with its users.
The new chief has struggled to stem losses, however. Twitch undertook two rounds of layoffs last year, cutting over 400 positions, part of wider job reductions at Amazon.
The online retail giant initiated its biggest-ever corporate job cuts in 2022, which it expanded to 27,000 positions across the company. It continued in October with a new round of cuts to its music division, which encompasses the company’s audio streaming platform and digital storefront for songs.
Oh and twitch staff on twitter found out about this news the same way we did and have no idea currently who is getting cut. This is all leaked.
We’re 10 days into January and 2024 already has 20% as many layoffs in the gaming industry as occurred in 2023. 10,500 was the total number of estimated layoffs last year.
deleted by creator
This is nice data but it doesn’t group by sub-industry. All the gaming companies are “consumer” compared to this list for just gaming. Definitely a good site though. The fact they’re tracking exactly who was laid off at each company is very interesting and could be very useful for targeting.
Tech companies really fucked themselves by all making a run on that one bank that was apparently funding literally every tech company in amerikkka
The tech bubble is bursting…
95% of the tech industry revolves around servicing businesses that were only viable with the free loans that the feds had been handing out the last few years
Excuse you, my company that provides a way to coordinate the different templating languages of six other companies for marketing emails is perfectly viable by itself, and without us, there’s no way that our clients would be able to scale to billion-user multi-cloud marketing email campaigns.
They also assumed growth pre COVID and during COVID lockdowns would continue infinitely and based hiring policies and business plans off of that. Now it’s all over, the growth has stopped and they’re screwed. I think Twitch even tried to allow nudity and softcore porn on the site with the new terms of service, that’s how desperate they are for user growth.
The worst thing about these layoffs is that the company doesn’t collapse from 1/3 people getting chopped.
Because it is a form of austerity. Once there is enough unemployment in the tech sector and people are desperate enough, some of them will be re-hired again with shittier pay and conditions.
I still see some leftists who believe in the myth that capitalists need workers to function. No, it is the other way round under capitalism: as long as the wage relations is protected and maintained, workers will always need capitalists to survive. A key component of socialism is precisely about dismantling private property ownership and the wage relations that sustain the capital order.
I mean, don’t capitalist also need workers to survive, given that they (capital owners) don’t make anything? Though I do agree that a decent portion of these layoffs seem to be more about disciplining the industry rather than any serious business proposals.
Weren’t a lot of tech firms also famous for just taking any available talent that was for hire, even if they had no need for their labour at the current moment, just so those talented workers wouldn’t go to their competitors and do something useful?
I spend all my time on twitch, and the only thing I’ve ever paid for is Twitch Turbo (gets rid of ALL ads, no matter what) and the free prime sub.
Can’t wait for that tech bubble to burst!
I haven’t used Twitch much in the past few years but I’m pretty sure a VPN or just using the site through an incognito browser gets rid of ads. Would recommend to stop giving money to Bezos.
deleted by creator