More than 500 Twitch job cuts have been confirmed today by the popular livestreaming platform as it looks to downsize the company.
Twitch’s parent company Amazon is also making hundreds of job cuts elsewhere, in the Prime Video and MGM Studios teams. It follows previous cuts in 2023 too.
The confirmation of the Twitch job cuts comes one day after Cecilia D’Anastasio published a report for Bloomberg saying Twitch is cutting 35% of its workforce.
Some in the UK have tweeted saying that they’ve been affected.
Twitch job cuts statement from CEO: ‘Our organisation is still meaningfully larger than it needs to be’
Twitch CEO Dan Clancy published a statement about the job cuts, and will host a stream on Thursday January 11th 2024 from 1pm PT to speak to the community live.
He said: “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.
“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.”
Dan Clancy, Twitch
“Unfortunately, despite these efforts, it has become clear that our organisation 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 organisation has been sized based upon where we optimistically expect our business to be in three 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.”
Dan added that Twitch ‘greatly values the employees we’re saying goodbye to today’ and that the platform ‘remains focused on serving our streamers and ensuring that this is the best place to livestream for many years to come’.
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Dom is an award-winning writer and finalist of the Esports Journalist of the Year 2023 award. He graduated from Bournemouth University with a 2:1 degree in Multi-Media Journalism in 2007.
As a long-time gamer having first picked up the NES controller in the late ’80s, he has written for a range of publications including GamesTM, Nintendo Official Magazine, industry publication MCV and others. He worked as head of content for the British Esports Federation up until February 2021, when he stepped back to work full-time on Esports News UK and offer esports consultancy and freelance services. Note: Dom still produces the British Esports newsletter on a freelance basis, so our coverage of British Esports is always kept simple – usually just covering the occasional press release – because of this conflict of interest.
