Twitch to lay off 500 employees
The popular streaming platform, owned by trillion dollar company Amazon, is set to lay off roughly 35% of its staff.
The games industry has taken a hit over the last year with numerous companies laying-off staff and the New Year hasn’t slowed that down. The latest company to let go of hundreds of employees is Twitch, with 500 employees, or 35 percent of its workforce, set to be laid off soon.
On January 9, 2024, Bloomberg’s Cecilia D'Anastasio reported that Twitch may be announcing the layoffs of 500 staff members tomorrow. This equates to roughly 35 percent of employees at Twitch, which follows on from the company laying off 400 employees in March 2023.
Source: Twitch
Twitch was acquired nine years ago by now-trillion dollar company Amazon, with D’Anastasio noting that the business remains unprofitable. In fact, Twitch is removing itself from Korea in late February after announcing that the cost of operating in the region is “10 times more expensive than in most other countries.”
The layoffs at Twitch are just another in a long series of layoffs that has rocked the games industry. Last year, Unity laid off employees, Amazon Games did the same, Bungie gutted its community and social teams, Epic Games had a string of layoffs while Naught Dog, Sega, Blizzard, CD Projekt RED, and others also cut employee numbers. Meanwhile, the video game market is projected to reach a revenue of $282.3 billion in 2024 according to Statista.com.
Suffice it to say, starting off the year with a round of layoffs is not a good look. Hopefully 2024 doesn’t continue on in 2023’s footsteps. Be sure to keep it locked to Shacknews as we bring you the latest on the goings on in the video game industry.
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replySam Chandler posted a new article, Twitch to lay off 500 employees
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Twitch cutting 35%/500 staff
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-09/amazon-s-twitch-to-cut-500-employees-about-35-of-staff-
Who needs staff when streamers are lining up to do all the hard work for peanuts!
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Now that they legalized soft-core porn, the money will print itself.
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These companies suck. They're just doing this to depress labour power.
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why aren't more non-tech companies doing this now too?
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This motherfucker here:
https://jacobin.com/2023/09/tim-gurner-capitalists-neoliberalism-unemployment-precarity-
Larry Summers is an idiot but attempting to in a single paragraph link Gurner's personal disdain for the working class with Summer's belief in the mainstream economic theory of how unemployment and inflation are linked is pretty stupid but unsurprising for Jacobin. Economists didn't think unemployment and inflation are linked out of some disdain for workers and belief that a certain number of people need to suffer so that bosses can exert more control over them but because they actually thought they had data suggesting a certain amount of aggregate spending power amongst people would lead to undesirable amounts of inflation (which is true in the abstract but seemingly not true specifically in terms of spending power driven entirely by normal wage gains).
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clearly Larry Summers is an evil wizard for believing a mainstream economic theory on inflation, that's why Obama leaned on him for advice
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I assume Twitch did some employee surveys and looked at attrition data after their last round of layoffs in March 2023 and realized they didn't sufficiently depress the power of their remaining employees so now they're back for more. Hopefully this does the trick and they don't have to cut another 400 in 6 months to teach them a lesson. Wonder when other CEOs outside tech will catch on to this one weird trick so they can stop having to increase wages.
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not sure why capital didn't just do this in 2021 and 2022 instead of giving tech workers big raises
pretty dumb imo
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Tech is a tiny portion of the overall market so for non-tech to only account for 30-40% of layoffs suggests there's a tiny number of layoffs outside that sector. Which is in line with what you'd expect given the historically low unemployment rates and great jobs numbers every month.
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US unemployment is about as low as it gets.
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Prime subs probably gone soon at this rate. RIP streamers income
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There was some boobs for a while.
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This argument gets thrown around a lot wrt tech stuff, but the truth is that you can probably lay off a good chunk of the staff at most software companies, and that company/their software would still function perfectly fine... for a while.
Written software doesn't just 'break down'. It's not like plumbing or a car that needs constant maintenance. Once it's compiled, it's not going to get worse on its own.
But feature development will slow. Or if it doesn't, because some PM is pushing hard for more features, then those features will eventually introduce more and more bugs. Less folks will be around with product and domain knowledge to tell why things were done a certain way. Tech debt will pile up, and these things will have a snowball effect.
And then there's future support. At least in my world (macOS development) things get a pretty big shakeup annually. If WWDC rolls around, and we don't have the headcount to start making sure stuff works well on the new beta, there's a decent chance that our software will start to degrade more and more every year. And maybe macOS 15 won't break it, but maybe macOS 16 will.
Look at Twitter as an example: elon came in and laid off a shitload of people and everyone said "See it's working perfectly fine!" but gradually there were more and more issues and now the product is completely enshitified.
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This was the first time I was like, "that sounds about the right number of employees for that service..."
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Looks like this was just the tip, Amazon laying off hundreds from Amazon Video and MGM too
https://www.indiewire.com/news/breaking-news/amazon-lays-off-several-hundred-staff-prime-video-mgm-1234942174/ -
Everyone knew this was coming. Amazon bought Twitch to boost their AWS video streaming tech. They got what they wanted out of it and the enschittification began quite awhile back. The obvious thing once the platform gets shittier is to lay off staff and continue to squeeze it until all that is left is a husk of what it once was.
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