We are only a little over a week into 2024 and already it's looking a lot like 2023 for the gaming and tech industries. Earlier this week, Bossa Studios laid off a third of its staff on January 5th. On the 8th, Unity laid off 25% of its workforce. And late in the day here on the 9th, we are learning that the Amazon owned livestream site Twitch is laying off about 35% of their staff, or about 500 workers.
The layoffs are expected to be announced as soon as Wednesday. The cuts come "amid concerns over losses at Twitch and after several top executives left the company in the span of a few months." Twitch also recently made public remarks about how expensive it is to host nearly 2 billion hours of live content a month. The company also recently ceased operating in South Korea due to "prohibitively expensive" costs. Twitch has so far not issued any public statement about this initial reporting from Bloomberg.
In the final months of 2023, several top executives announced their departures, including Twitch’s chief product officer, chief customer officer and chief content officer. Twitch also lost its chief revenue officer, who worked on Twitch from within Amazon’s Ads unit.
Twitch has already gone through two prior layoff periods in 2023 where over 400 positions were cut in total. Those prior layoffs were a part of wider layoffs at Amazon and its owned subsidiaries. The Amazon layoffs, which began in 2022, accounted for roughly 27,000 cut jobs by the end of 2023.
Amazon purchased Twitch in August 2014 for $970 million.
