Amazon To Fire 500 More Twitch Employees, Amid Rumors It’s Been Unprofitable For Years

gameranx.com:

Amazon has revealed plans to fire 500 more Twitch employees, in a freewheeling spiral for what once seemed to be the monopolist of the live streaming business.

Twitch’s founders started off their internet livestreaming video business with Justin.tv in 2007. Twitch was conceived as a spinoff of Justin.tv, dedicated to video games and launched in 2011. It’s massive explosion and success at this time led to the company moving their entire business over to Twitch, and in the fateful day of August 25, 2014, Twitch CEO Emmett Shear announced that they had been acquired by Amazon.

Unfortunately, as reported by Bloomberg today, insiders are claiming that Twitch never became profitable for Amazon for the past nine years that they owned the streaming service.

This is a stunning admission, because it means none of the many, many issues that struck Twitch through all these years under Amazon were material to its success and failure, and it’s simply never been sustainable.

Amazon has tried to monetize Twitch in many different ways. They started with selling microtransactions for emoticons. Twitch Prime offered users extra value if they connected their Twitch accounts to their Amazon Prime subscriptions. They also signed some streamers to lucrative deals, but then they started to reverse track.

In more recent years, Twitch Prime users had to pay extra to skip ads, and Amazon changed their contracts to pay less money to their streamers.

Twitch suffered from many hacks and account compromises, and went through several outrage cycles over streaming content restrictions and moderation policies. They have acquired various assorted odds and ends of companies, such as the Curse network of game websites, and the Internet Games Database.