Discord is laying off 17% of its employees
Discord is the latest gaming-centric tech company to lay off a large number off its employees, with 170 people from across various departments being cut.
CEO Jason Citron announced the cuts with an internal memo – leaked to The Verge – in which he stated that Discord needs to shift course if it is to become profitable for the first time. While they have raised around $1 billion in funding (thanks to hefty investment from the likes of Sony) and have over $700 million in the bank, and despite being the de facto chat platform for gamers, Discord has never turned a profit.
Part of that, in the last few years, will have been down to the company massively expanding since pre-pandemic levels – lockdowns saw Discord thrown into the spotlight as a communications platform. “We grew quickly and expanded our workforce even faster,” Citron said, “increasing by 5x since 2020. As a result, we took on more projects and became less efficientin how we operated.”
So, while rolling out some buzzwords like needing to “sharpen our focus” and getting more “agility”, it’s pretty obvious that Discord vastly overestimated what would happen after lockdowns ended, just like all the other tech companies that momentarily boomed and then eventually found that the sudden growth wouldn’t last.
Then again, that’s 170 people who had solid jobs for the last few years, and at the very least Discord has put a compensation package to help ease the fall. These include:
Discord’s layoffs follow on from similar moves by Unity and Twitch to start off 2024, and similarly from the widespread layoffs across gaming and tech industry over the past year.
Source: The Verge
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