Twitch Has Laid Off Over 400 Employees
To say times are tough in the job market is an understatement, to say the least. With stagnating wages in many industries, as well as the constantly rising costs of essentials. Whether you work in retail, tech, or industrial, things are tough for the average worker. This is especially true with the lack of stability within the tech industry specifically. Tech giants such as Microsoft, Google, and Meta are all making massive cuts to their workforce in order to preserve profits for their shareholders. It appears that streaming giant Twitch is the next company that will be cutting jobs within the tech industry.
Twitch Laid Off 1/5th Of Its Workforce
Today, in a blog post on Twitch’s official site it was revealed that 400 jobs had been cut from the streaming giant’s workforce. Details are scarce in terms of what departments of Twitch were affected by these layoffs. But Twitch CEO Dan Clancy had this to say about the layoffs. “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.” Clancy has only just taken over the CEO position of Twitch this past week. As the former founder and CEO Emmett Shear stepped down from the role late last week. This layoff will cut just around 1/5th of Twitch’s workforce.
These layoffs come off a record-breaking 2022 for both Twitch and its parent company Amazon. Twitch hauled in a record amount of revenue in 2022 with just over $2.8 billion in revenue. While Amazon the parent company of Twitch hauled in just over $149 billion just in the 4th quarter of 2022 alone. This isn’t the only move by Twitch to carve more money out of their employees and community. In 2022 the company reworked its revenue split with its content creators from a 70/30 revenue split to a massively adjusted 50/50. So if you subscribe to your favorite streamer for $5, Twitch takes $2.50 of that automatically. This was met with backlash from creators and viewers alike but unfortunately, Twitch never addressed this issue publicly. This revenue split caused an exodus of big-name streamers who opted to pursue a partnership with YouTube instead.
The streaming space is only going to get more competitive with massive sites like YouTube as well as independent streaming sites like Kick all fighting for a piece of the pie. Laying off staff whose work likely affects the quality of the site’s performance as well as moderation is likely a mistake. One would think with all the layoffs at Twitter which have caused the site massive technical issues/ Alongside content moderation concerns that have driven off many big named advertisers. These problems could very well be Twitch’s problem if they continue to go down this path. But only time will tell how these layoffs will affect the overall health of the site.
What do you think of these layoffs? Let us know in the comments and don’t forget to check back for the latest gaming news and information.
