Amazon introduced a collection of layoffs impacting Prime Video, however its gaming division Twitch can also be impacted. The streamer is reducing 500 individuals from their roles—an estimated one-third of employees.
Twitch CEO Dan Clancy introduced the layoffs this morning, with 500 individuals estimated to be round 35% of Twitch employees. Bloomberg reported the platform was contemplating decreasing employees on Tuesday, with the corporate confirming the cuts in a prolonged put up on its web site.
“I needed to ship a brief word to let you understand that we’ve made the troublesome determination to scale back the dimensions of our workforce right this moment,” the word to the Twitch neighborhood begins. “At this time limit, we’re centered on speaking with our workers and offering them with readability on how this impacts every of them.” Dan Clancy shared the interior memo despatched to Twitch staffers asserting the layoffs.
“We nonetheless have work to do to rightsize our firm and I remorse having to share that we’re taking the painful step to scale back our headcount by simply over 500 individuals throughout Twitch,” the announcement reads. “This will probably be a really exhausting day. Our service exists to empower communities to create, collectively, and each single one in all you has performed an important function in fostering our neighborhood and furthering that mission.”
“Over the past 12 months, we’ve been working to construct a extra sustainable enterprise in order that Twitch will probably be right here for the long term and all year long we’ve got lower prices and made many choices to be extra environment friendly. Sadly, regardless of these efforts, it has grow to be clear that our group continues to be meaningfully bigger than it must be given the dimensions of our enterprise.”
“Final 12 months we paid out over $1 billion to streamers. So whereas the Twitch enterprise stays robust, for a while now the group has been sized based mostly upon the place we optimistically anticipate our enterprise to be in three or extra years—not the place we’re right this moment.”
“As with many different corporations within the tech house, we aren’t any sizing our group based mostly upon the present scale of our enterprise and conservative predictions of how we anticipate to develop sooner or later.”
Streaming giants struggled to proper themselves after promoting spend tanked in 2023. Spotify went by means of three rounds of job cuts in 2023 alone because it restructured its podcast division and lower exhibits that remained vastly unprofitable gambles, like Megan Markle’s podcast ‘Archetypes.’