It has been revealed that Twitch – the streaming platform owned by Amazon – is set to lay off a whopping 500 employees, which is around 35% of the firm’s entire employee base. This is the third round of redundancies at the company, bringing the total number of Twitch employees hit by these layoffs to almost 1000 in the space of just twelve months.
This news follows the shutdown of Twitch’s operations in South Korea amid rising bandwidth costs in the region and more than a few controversial topics centred on the Twitch leadership team and the company’s seemingly consistent ability to upset users.
Round Three Commences
In a report published by Bloomberg, it was stressed that up to 500 employees will lose their jobs at Twitch in ongoing restructuring efforts. This comes following the departure of several high-ranking employees who have since moved on to what could be described as greener pastures.
In the last year or so, there has been a global downturn in the number of users consuming streamed content, and certain trends and scandals have laid waste to Twitch as a platform. For instance, the ‘adult content’ controversies, the rise of Kick.com as a disruptive competitor, and changes to Twitch’s partner and revenue programs.
Reportedly, Twitch remains ‘unprofitable’ almost a decade after it was acquired by Amazon, which paid almost a billion dollars for the platform in 2014. Twitch might be a streaming-based tech titan, but a lot of what it offers is available to consume for free, both as a streamer and a viewer, which means there are precious few revenue streams to make the platform profitable, even today.
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Kick says they’ll buy Twitch. Amazon should just sell it already.
All these losers will have to kiss Adin Ross’s ass now
Are you sure? Pretty sure 500 is more than 35% of their staff closer to like 60%. Just shut it down or sell it off already someone like Elon could make it profitable or Kick could downsize it and use the resources.
Microsoft should buy EA next and finally bring the franchise back.
Actually more than 35% new Arctic led confirm over 500 will be fired
I thought they laid off 400 last year and that was almost half of the company how do they have 500 more to lay off and that’s only 35% something doesn’t add up last year they had 1,000 employees. Something is fishy
Dan Clancy is an idiot after laying off now near thousands of people he says Twitch can’t be profitable but he has plans to fix that. This guy has no idea what he’s doing and Twitch will continue to not be profitable at this point Amazon is just going to have to shut it down. Not only that he’s open to bringing back XXX Twitch the thing that scared advertisers and I guarantee pissed up higher ups and shareholders in Amazon.
Twitch needs to reverse their policy by that take 70% from creators not 50 even then I don’t know if they would be profitable. If it’s not profitable then it needs to be shut down.