Hot on the heels of yesterday’s news of more layoffs at Unity comes the revelation that Amazon is the next to fire staff. As first leaked by Bloomberg, 500 employees will receive pink slips today, amounting to 35% of Twitch’s total workforce. Twitch CEO Dan Clancy announced the cuts in a blog post this morning, explaining that while the company business “remains strong,” having paid content creators over a billion dollars in 2023 for the work that creates that business, the company itself is still too big “given the size of [its] business.”
“I know many of you are wondering why this is happening. Over the last year, we’ve been working to build a more sustainable business so that Twitch will be here for the long run and throughout the year we have cut costs and made many decisions to be more efficient. Unfortunately, despite these efforts, it has become clear that our organization is still meaningfully larger than it needs to be given the size of our business. Last year we paid out over $1 billion to streamers. So while the Twitch business remains strong, for some time now the organization has been sized based upon where we optimistically expect our business to be in 3 or more years, not where we’re at today. As with many other companies in the tech space, we are now sizing our organization based upon the current scale of our business and conservative predictions of how we expect to grow in the future. This decision, while incredibly difficult and painful, is necessary to ensure that we can continue to serve our streamers sustainably without impacting their ability to support their careers on Twitch. Part of what makes this so difficult is the passion that so many of you share for the Twitch community, and the hard work you’ve put into serving our streamers.” [Emphasis ours.]
According to Bloomberg’s sources, this round of layoffs also comes as a result of the departure of several top executives who left their positions in the span of a few months. Either way, it’s a continuing trend from last year for the company, as Twitch had two firing rounds this past March and October, the former of which happened shortly before Twitch’s CEO resigned. This time, however, Amazon Games – which runs the company’s MMORPGs that we cover here – has apparently been spared, though other divisions at Amazon were not.
