Days into his new role as CEO, Dan Clancy has taken to the airwaves to reveal that, owing to ‘the current macroeconomic environment’, 400 members of staff have been dismissed in a drastic round of Twitch layoffs. This news comes hours after it was revealed that Amazon, Twitch’s parent company, would be making a staggering 9,000 layoffs across the board.
It seemed for a while that the round of redundancies taking the tech, gaming, and esports worlds by storm was petering off a little, but it has come back in full force in the last few days. Recently, the likes of Microsoft, Riot Games, and Meta have made mass redundancies, and titanic firms like Apple are actively slashing projects in order to avoid making more.
And now, 400 people have been let go from Twitch.
‘We’ve Made The Very Difficult Decision…’
It’s a line that we’ve seen trending all too often in recent months, with countless organisations and fans taking to social media to announce waves of layoffs. In the world of gaming and esports, things have been particularly tough, and recently, some gaming organisations have gone under entirely.
As a firm, Twitch isn’t immune to redundancies, and a statement posted by Dan Clancy – who has been the CEO of Twitch for less than a week – confirmed that 400 employees would be let go.
Like many companies, our business has been impacted by the current macroeconomic environment, and user and revenue growth has not kept pace with our expectations. In order to run our business sustainably, we’ve made the very difficult decision to shrink the size of our workforce.
Dan Clancy steps into the role following the (timely) departure of Emmett Shear, who was CEO of the super-giant streaming platform for sixteen years. However, some creators operating on the platform are already nurturing some bad juju about the move, as Dan Clancy infamously penned a lengthy post toward the end of 2022 essentially explaining why a 70/30 revenue split just wasn’t possible, which got up the noses of millions of streamers.
Sadly, this news has triggered a wave of responses on social media, with some doomsayers claiming that Twitch is a platform that’s mere moments away from imploding. That’s not likely, and if anything, the redundancies should help recover costs and bolster the platform.
Perhaps.
For more Insider Gaming news, check out our coverage of Rare’s plans to support Sea of Thieves for another five years.
