Amazon is laying off more than 14,000 corporate employees. Within those layoffs, Amazon Games and Twitch will be hit in some capacity.
Bloomberg says, without going into specifics, that both video games and the cloud-computing area of the company will be affected. Insider Gaming has reached out to Amazon to ask how many people were set to be let go from the gaming division and Twitch. As of publishing, a response has not been received.
According to Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier, the cuts “would largely fall on its offices in Irvine and San Diego, as well as its central publishing division.”
“The company will reduce the amount of work it does on big-budget titles, particularly surrounding massively multiplayer online games or MMOs,” the report reads.
“While we’re proud of our successes in first-party AAA game development and publishing, we have made the difficult decision to halt a significant amount of our first-party AAA game development work – specifically around MMOs – within Amazon Game Studios, including making significant role reductions in our studios in Irvine and San Diego, as well as our central publishing team,” an email sent by vice president of audio, Twitch, and games Steve Boom to employees said.
Included in the layoffs was Tarfu, who had been with Twitch for 11 years.
“I started off working in trust & safety, then moved to customer experience,” he shared. “I was the person who built the entire fraud program at Twitch. One of the reasons I never told people what I did for work.
“I was the one keeping bad actors off Twitch who steal and abuse revenue on the platform. I guess I did my job too well since they let me go. But do I have some great stories of being there over a decade.”
News of the mass layoffs was first reported by Reuters. The cuts would be, according to the outlet, the largest cut since 2022, when Amazon let go of roughly 27,000 people. This new set of layoffs would be the largest in company history, with impacted employees to be notified via email.
Insider Gaming will have more coverage of the layoffs, including what happens to Amazon Games, as it becomes available.
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Mike has been covering the gaming industry since 2012, and has reported on some of the largest events in the industry while also working as an investigative reporter. Outside of…
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