Twitch To Lay Off 500 Employees

gameinformer.com:

Last year was one of the best years for game releases but easily one of the worst for the people who made them, with more than 10,000 workers laid off by various companies, including Microsoft, Epic Games, BioWare, Bungie, Naughty Dog, and many more. Unfortunately, it seems this heartbreaking trend is continuing into this new year as yesterday, Bloomberg reported that Amazon-owned streaming company Twitch is set to lay off 500 employees, or about 35 percent of its staff. 

These layoffs follow two rounds of layoffs Twitch experienced last year. Bloomberg expects the layoffs to be announced today. As for why, the publication says running Twitch is extremely expensive and the company has struggled to financially get on top of the cost to support billions of hours of livestreamed content.

Just last year, Twitch's chief revenue officer, chief content officer, chief customer officer, and chief product officer left the company. Plus, in December, Twitch announced it would be ending its service in South Korea. And, according to Bloomberg, Twitch has worked on increasing its advertising in recent years but despite that focus, it has remained «unprofitable,» its sources say. 

These 500 cut jobs expected to happen today join 400 positions cut over 2023 at Twitch, and these layoffs join an ever-growing list of layoffs that made last year one of the worst ever for game developers and people in game development-adjacent industries. 

In January of last year, Microsoft laid off 10,000 employees amidst its ongoing $69 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard, which it completed in October. 

Striking Distance Studios, the team behind 2022's The Callisto Protocol, laid off more than 30 employees in August of 2023. That same month, Mass