Twitch lay off 500 people as CEO concedes that staffing strategy has been "optimistic"

rockpapershotgun.com:

Amazon-owned Twitch have announced that they will lay off "just over 500" people - almost 35% of their workforce - in the course of on-going plans to "rightsize our company", with CEO Dan Clancy conceding that the streaming service has been operating based on "where we optimistically expect our business to be in 3 or more years, not where we're at today."

Bloomberg broke the news earlier this week, and Twitch have now confirmed the report. "I know many of you are wondering why this is happening," reads an internal email to staff from Clancy, which has now been posted on the company blog. "Over the last year, we've been working to build a more sustainable business so that Twitch will be here for the long run and throughout the year we have cut costs and made many decisions to be more efficient.

"Unfortunately, despite these efforts, it has become clear that our organization is still meaningfully larger than it needs to be given the size of our business," it continues. "Last year we paid out over $1 billion to streamers. So while the Twitch business remains strong, for some time now the organization has been sized based upon where we optimistically expect our business to be in 3 or more years, not where we're at today.

"As with many other companies in the tech space, we are now sizing our organization based upon the current scale of our business and conservative predictions of how we expect to grow in the future."

Clancy added that the decision "is necessary to ensure that we can continue to serve our streamers sustainably without impacting their ability to support their careers on Twitch". Affected staff are now being contacted about their severance packages, with next steps varying by country. It appears that