Twitch apparently lays off a third of its employees

Debora Pape

10.1.2024

Translation: machine translated

The streaming platform Twitch will soon be laying off hundreds of employees: One in three will probably have to go. Twitch's workforce was downsized as recently as March.

Things are apparently not going well at Amazon subsidiary Twitch: around 500 employees are to be made redundant. This was first reported by Bloomberg. The magazine cites people who are said to be familiar with Twitch's redundancy plans. Twitch has not yet confirmed the rumours. According to Bloomberg, however, details of the redundancies are expected to be announced possibly as early as this Wednesday.

First rise, then stagnation

Twitch is the largest platform for live streaming. It had only made around 400 employees redundant in March because both viewer numbers and profits "had not risen as expected".

At the beginning of the pandemic in early 2020, Twitch recorded a large increase in concurrent viewers. The maximum was reached in April 2021: an average of 3.1 million people were watching streams on the platform at the same time. After that, the number of viewers decreased again slightly and levelled off at around 2.5 million simultaneous users.

Twitch is controversial due to the distribution of profits

In the streaming community, Twitch has repeatedly caused a furore with its inconsistent account bans and rules on freedom of movement, especially for female streamers. It was only in December that Twitch allowed more naked skin and more explicit depictions in the streams, but cancelled the announcement shortly afterwards. All of this is causing dissatisfaction - among streamers too.

The rather unfavourable distribution of profits for content creators is another reason why major streamers are increasingly turning their backs on Twitch and switching to YouTube, for example. Twitch keeps 50 per cent of the streamers' revenue generated via the platform for itself. This has always applied to small and medium-sized streamers, while the large accounts received separate contracts or a 70 per cent share. In September 2022, Twitch's announcement that even larger streamers would only receive 50 per cent caused anger among streamers.

If Twitch actually implements the redundancy plans, the company would have lost around half of its workforce within a year. It is clear that this will not necessarily have a positive impact on the quality of the platform.

Dismissals are currently not uncommon

Mass redundancies are currently a sad trend in the gaming industry and in tech companies. Just a few days ago, the company Unity caused a furore with 1,800 redundancies until March 2024. My colleague Domi reported on this and also looks at the many other redundancies in the industry over the past year.

Note from 11 January 2024: Twitch's CEO Dan Clancy actually announced the dismissal of 500 employees on Wednesday morning at 6 a.m. via email.

Debora Pape

Editor

Debora.Pape@galaxus.de

Feels just as comfortable in front of a gaming PC as she does in a hammock in the garden. Likes the Roman Empire, container ships and science fiction books. Focuses mostly on unearthing news stories about IT and smart products.