Amazon’s live-streaming platform Twitch is looking to slash about 35% of its workforce, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday. The impending layoffs would affect about 500 workers, Bloomberg reported, citing sources familiar with the matter. The publication said the layoffs could be announced as early as Wednesday. The job cuts come after a series of executive departures at the end of 2023.
This is yet another round of layoffs for the Amazon-owned platform. Twitch CEO Tom Clancy announced in March that the company would be laying off an additional 400 employees. “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,” Clancy wrote at the time in a company blog post. “In order to run our business sustainably, we’ve made the very difficult decision to shrink the size of our workforce,” he told reporters. Other technology firms have also experienced difficulties as a result of the slowing economy.
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Twitch’s parent company, Amazon, laid off 180 Amazon Games employees in November, a small number compared to the 27,000 it laid off earlier in 2023. That mass layoff also had a significant impact on Twitch, affecting 400 employees in March 2023, just after longtime CEO Emmett Shear left the company after 16 years. Twitch’s layoffs aren’t the only sign of trouble; the platform’s recent controversies with X-rated streams bombarding the site during the final weeks of 2023 were a huge blow for the image of the company to investors of Amazon.
To say the least, it’s been a turbulent start to the new year, with hundreds of workers seemingly on their way out, region support being dropped entirely, and many fearing the worst. To add salt to the wound, rival platform Kick, a competitor that only emerged in 2023, has chimed in on the conversation. Bijan Tehrani, co-founder, has hinted that it’s only a matter of time before they buy Twitch outright. With rumors of Rumble wanting to put their own offer on the table months ago, there might be a Solomon-like split with the streaming community.
Kick has been known to be outlandish with their content, openly promoting channels aimed adults with simulated sex and an entire platform built on gambling Whereas Rumble finds itself being a more “moral” retreat, toned down tremendously in terms of provocative physical content and more lenient on the “speech” side of the 1st Amendment.
These bold statements should be taken with a grain of salt for the time being. Kick is still a young platform, barely a year old, whereas Twitch has been in the spotlight for well over a decade, with many years helped by Amazon. However, the CEO of Kick doesn’t mind letting the world know his intentions by openly offering a job to any of the fired Twitch employees. Twitch has yet to address the reported layoffs, and impacted employees appear to have yet to be given their notice; however, Bloomberg suggests that the drastic company reduction is only a matter of days away.
What do you think about Twitch being put under the thumb of Kick or Rumble?
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