Video Games

Twitch will reportedly cut about 500 workers as Amazon slims down

Over a third of the streaming platform’s workforce to be laid off

Marco Wutz

Twitch will reportedly cut about 500 workers as Amazon slims down
Twitch will reportedly cut about 500 workers as Amazon slims down /

Leading streaming platform Twitch, which is owned by Amazon, will soon announce massive job cuts, according to Bloomberg. Around 500 employees – 35% of the company’s total workforce – are said to be on the chopping block in this round of layoffs. Bloomberg did not receive official confirmation after a request for comment from Twitch, but reports the job cuts could be revealed as early as today.

This wave of cuts is embedded in a larger effort by Amazon to lower costs, which has already led to over 27,000 people losing their jobs at the company since 2022. Back in November 2023, Amazon Games was hit by one of these layoff rounds as well. Twitch already let go over 400 employees last year, including several people in leadership positions.

Twitch logo on purple background.
Twitch seems to be heading for another wave of job cuts / Twitch

Though it focused more and more on generating ad revenue over the last couple of years, Twitch seems to be unable to leave the red numbers behind, putting new CEO Dan Clancy in a difficult position. While Amazon wants the streaming platform to make a profit, the efforts to generate it drive away streamers and viewers, who absolutely detest ads – a vicious cycle Twitch has been imprisoned in for years now.

Late last year, the company also announced a retreat from the South Korean market, where high internet costs designed to favor domestic companies proved too great an obstacle for Twitch to compete anymore. Recently South Korea’s biggest streaming platform, AfreecaTV, announced a rebranding of its platform to SOOP in an effort to gain a greater pie of the global market.

YouTube, of course, is another strong competitor for Twitch as a live streaming platform, while the efforts of Meta and X have so far been negligible, at least for the gaming audience.

Further cost cuts at Twitch might mean that more monetization efforts are being planned as well, which could be detrimental to streamers and viewers – the cycle continues.

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Marco Wutz
MARCO WUTZ

Marco Wutz is a writer from Parkstetten, Germany. He has a degree in Ancient History and a particular love for real-time and turn-based strategy games like StarCraft, Age of Empires, Total War, Age of Wonders, Crusader Kings, and Civilization as well as a soft spot for Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail. He began covering StarCraft 2 as a writer in 2011 for the largest German community around the game and hosted a live tournament on a stage at gamescom 2014 before he went on to work for Bonjwa, one of the country's biggest Twitch channels. He branched out to write in English in 2015 by joining tl.net, the global center of the StarCraft scene run by Team Liquid, which was nominated as the Best Coverage Website of the Year at the Esports Industry Awards in 2017. He worked as a translator on The Crusader Stands Watch, a biography in memory of Dennis "INTERNETHULK" Hawelka, and provided live coverage of many StarCraft 2 events on the social channels of tl.net as well as DreamHack, the world's largest gaming festival. From there, he transitioned into writing about the games industry in general after his graduation, joining GLHF, a content agency specializing in video games coverage for media partners across the globe, in 2021. He has also written for NGL.ONE, kicker, ComputerBild, USA Today's ForTheWin, The Sun, Men's Journal, and Parade. Email: marco.wutz@glhf.gg

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