Twitch Layoffs: 400 Let Go

All the details of the most recent Twitch layoffs

In a recent blog post, new Twitch CEO Dan Clancy announced that Twitch would lay off 400 members of its staff in order to save costs against “the current macroeconomic environment”. This comes just a week after former CEO and co-founder Emmett Shear announced that he would step down from his position to spend more time with his family.

It also comes after the platform announced some rather unpopular changes. The 50-50 revenue split for example was already very unpopular with many creators of the platforms. And then there were also talks of forcing creators to run ads during their streams at certain intervals.

Its parent company amazon announced earlier today that they would cut over 9.000 employees. Following the 18.000 the delivery giant has laid off in November of last year. Most of these workplaces seemed to be linked to various tech endeavors.

At Twitch, this chain of events starts to look a little suspicious. Around 300 employees left Twitch in 2021 and in 2022 some more high-level staff members like the former head of creator development Marcus Graham also left because “[The newer executives were] unwilling to learn what this community was, why it was special.”

Over the past few years, the platform has focused more and more on the business side of things. Not so long ago the idea was to promote smaller creators on the platform by offering them run ads for a premium on other streamers' streams.

It's also worth noting that last year, Twitch made an estimated $2.8 billion USD of revenue. This makes the claim that “User and revenue growth has not kept pace with our expectations. In order to run our business sustainably, we’ve made the very difficult decision to shrink the size of our workforce” a little less genuine.

The streaming giant seems to be on the same course as many other big social media platforms. Its once passionate staff who genuinely cared about the vision of the platform are slowly being replaced by businessmen from other big tech companies. And the platform starts to care more about the numbers than natural growth.

Twitch is struggling to stay ahead

For years, the only way to attract viewers was to get big on another platform and then get viewers to Twitch. And you can see it for yourself, on YouTube much of the most popular content, especially gaming are clips and highlights from Twitch streams. And those usually rack up way more views than the actual stream.

It's one of the reasons why Twitch's biggest competitor in this space, YouTube has started to lock some of the platform's biggest creators into exclusive contracts. Creators like Ludwig, Sykkuno, Valkyrae, and others have jumped ship and brought their audiences with them.

This trend will likely continue as YouTube and YouTube Gaming are growing every year. After all, it is much easier for a content creator to grow within YouTube's ecosystem. YouTube's viewership dwarfs Twitch's and draws viewers who might not even watch live streams.

It's left to be seen if Twitch managed to address the ongoing issues on its platform. Such as questionable moderation, incoherent ruling when it comes to bans, and the general treatment of its creators. The one thing Twitch still has going for it is a strong community that'll cling to it no matter how bad it gets.

But it's not all doom and gloom yet, Twitch is still the number one destination when it comes to the streaming of video games, with many esports such as League of Legends and Counter Strike broadcasting their biggest event on the platform.

We'll of course keep you updated on the situation here on ESTNN