Twitch is laying off 500 employees, or a staggering 35% of its own workforce, soon. Twitch has since confirmed the job losses in a blog post; the cuts were first reported by Bloomberg.
“This will be a very hard day. Our service exists to empower communities to create, together, and every single one of you has played a vital role in fostering our community and furthering that mission,” CEO Dan Clancy said.
“I know many of you are wondering why this is happening. Over the last year, we’ve been working to build a more sustainable business so that Twitch will be here for the long run and throughout the year we have cut costs and made many decisions to be more efficient,” the executive added. “Unfortunately, despite these efforts, it has become clear that our organization is still meaningfully larger than it needs to be given the size of our business. Last year we paid out over $1 billion to streamers. So while the Twitch business remains strong, for some time now the organization has been sized based upon where we optimistically expect our business to be in 3 or more years, not where we’re at today.
“As with many other companies in the tech space, we are now sizing our organization based upon the current scale of our business and conservative predictions of how we expect to grow in the future. This decision, while incredibly difficult and painful, is necessary to ensure that we can continue to serve our streamers sustainably without impacting their ability to support their careers on Twitch. Part of what makes this so difficult is the passion that so many of you share for the Twitch community, and the hard work you’ve put into serving our streamers.”
This comes after former CEO Emmett Shear stepped down last March after 16 years with the company. Former vice president of creator and community experience Dan Clancy replaced him as CEO.
During the same time, Twitch also laid off 400 employees. Amazon owns Twitch, and this isn’t the only aspect of the company that was impacted by layoffs. Amazon laid off 180 employees on its Crown Channel and Game Growth teams back in November 2023. Last month, Twitch announced that it would be shutting down in South Korea in February 2024 as Clancy said that it was prohibitively expensive to operate the streaming service in the country.
Unfortunately, layoffs continue to run rampant in the new year within the video game industry after 2023 was already a brutal year for developers. Unity is also poised to lay off 25% of its workforce soon.
