Image: Amazon
Over 500 members of Twitch staff are now out of a job.
Amazon has laid off, “several hundred,” members of staff across its Prime Video, Amazon MGM Studios and Twitch divisions. CEO Dan Clancy attributed the mass layoffs to a decision to, “rightsize,” the company. In Twitch alone, Amazon is laying off more than 500 people in what Clancy calls, “a very hard day.”
An earlier report from Bloomberg leaked impending Twitch layoffs happening this week, but Amazon has now begun notifying staff of their firings not just within the streaming platform, but other segments of the company too.
More layoffs happening at Twitch
This isn’t the first time Amazon has committed to mass layoffs like this one. Less than a year ago, a large series of Amazon layoffs saw 400 people fired from Twitch. Amazon Games also cut nearly 200 jobs and a few of its divisions in November 2023. Twitch also announced that it was ending its service in South Korea due to, “prohibitively expensive,” streaming costs this year, but it appears that none of it was enough to create a financially sustainable future at the company.
In a note to Amazon staff shared by Variety, Clancy said:
[...] We’ve identified opportunities to reduce or discontinue investments in certain areas while increasing our investment and focus on content and product initiatives that deliver the most impact. As a result of these decisions, we will be eliminating several hundred roles across the Prime Video and Amazon MGM Studios organization. Today, we will begin to reach out to colleagues who are impacted by these role reductions.
On the Twitch layoffs, Clancy published a blog post saying:
Today I have some incredibly difficult news to share. As you all know, we have worked hard over the last year to run our business as sustainably as possible. Unfortunately, we still have work to do to rightsize our company and I regret having to share that we are taking the painful step to reduce our headcount by just over 500 people across Twitch. 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.
Casey explained that Twitch has been working, “to build a more sustainable business,” over the past year, but the company is, “still meaningfully larger than it needs to be given the size of our business.” Casey noted that over $1 billion had been paid out to streamers in 2023 and the company is now being sized based on, “the current scale of our business and conservative predictions of how we expect to grow in the future.”
Clancy mentioned that these layoffs are in line with current tech industry trends, which have seen a massive rise in staff layoffs in recent years. In the games industry alone, the Twitch layoffs, combined with Unity’s more than 1800 staff cuts, have led to more jobs lost this year than in 2023. The tech industry layoffs show no signs of slowing down, which makes for a worrying trend overall.