Amazon‘s gamer-centric streaming outlet Twitch is shedding 500 staffers, CEO Dan Clancy informed staff in a memo this morning.
The transfer is being made in sync with cutbacks at company siblings Prime Video and Amazon Studios. Bloomberg had reported the layoffs at Twitch on Tuesday. Clancy mentioned the information had “leaked,” suggesting that the Amazon division needed to maintain off on confirming any particulars or answering worker questions in an effort to co-ordinate at the moment’s announcement with that of the opposite divisions.
Clancy acknowledged in a weblog publish that the cuts are “painful” and that they arrive after the corporate had already been on a cost-cutting drive. Regardless of that effort to be extra environment friendly, he wrote, “our group remains to be meaningfully bigger than it must be given the scale of our enterprise. Final yr, we paid out over $1 billion to streamers. So whereas the Twitch enterprise stays sturdy, for a while now the group has been sized based mostly upon the place we optimistically anticipate our enterprise to be in 3 or extra years, not the place we’re at at the moment. As with many different corporations within the tech house, we are actually sizing our group based mostly upon the present scale of our enterprise and conservative predictions of how we anticipate to develop sooner or later.”
For advertisers, Twitch has been positioned as one of many pillars of Amazon’s leisure and media portfolio, alongside Prime Video, Amazon Music, Hearth TV and Freevee. Whereas it has been within the Amazon fold for almost a decade, Twitch has been in a transitional interval in current months, following the departure final March of founder and former CEO Emmett Shear.
Clancy didn’t title any media shops, however he addressed the Tuesday reviews and ensuing angst in his weblog publish. “I additionally wish to acknowledge how upset I used to be yesterday that this info leaked,” he wrote. “I’m sorry for all the anxiousness that it triggered over the past a number of hours. Our hope was that you simply all would hear from us this morning and really rapidly perceive how this impacted your position and we had been sadly not in a position to speed up the timeline, which I do know may be very irritating.”
