Amazon’s Twitch to lay off 35 percent of its workforce

Amazon-owned Twitch is laying off around 500 employees, which works out to 35 percent of its workforce.

The news was reported on Tuesday by Bloomberg before being confirmed by the live-streaming company on Wednesday. In a blog post, Twitch CEO Dan Clancy said it “has become clear that our organization is still meaningfully larger than it needs to be given the size of our business.”

According to Clancy, the Twitch business as it stands “remains strong” but isn’t at the size it hopes to be. Instead, he says, that target will likely be reached in three or more years. Meanwhile, the company paid out over $1 billion USD (about 1.338 billion CAD) to streamers last year alone.

It should be noted that per Bloomberg, Twitch remains unprofitable even nine years after Amazon acquired it. Last March, Twitch laid off 400 employees as part of a larger swath of 9,000 job cuts at Amazon. Alongside this month’s Twitch layoffs, Amazon is also eliminating hundreds of roles across Prime Video and MGM Studios.

Clearly, layoffs are happening in a variety of industries, but the gaming sector has felt these blows especially hard in the past year. In 2023, more than 10,000 people were laid off at the likes of PlayStation, Xbox, EA and Epic Games. This came amid a slew of successes in the industry, particularly the highest-rated string of game releases in two decades.

On top of that, more than 2,300 developers have already been laid off this year, including 1,800 at Unity, even though we’re not even two full weeks into January. Hopefully, these job cuts finally slow down in the coming months, but so far, 2024’s been off to a rough start.

Source: Twitch