Another round of layoffs hits Twitch.
The Amazon-owned streaming platform will lay off 35% of its employees, or nearly 500 employees, Bloomberg reports, The reduction will be announced early this week.
Twitch did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment.
It’s the latest blow to the already beleaguered company, which cut hundreds of jobs last year amid leadership changes, rising operating costs and community discontent. Shortly after Emmett Shear, Twitch’s co-founder and longtime CEO, handed over the reins to the company’s current CEO Dan Clancy, the company laid off 400 employees. Amazon cut another 180 jobs late last year when it shuttered its Crown channel, Amazon-run Twitch programming, and shut down its Game Growth group, which was supposed to help game creators market themselves.
Twitch also recently announced plans to shut down the service in South Korea — one of the world’s largest esports markets — due to “exorbitant” network fees. in Blog post In announcing the closure, Clancy wrote that the company was operating at a “significant loss” in Korea, and that there was “no way forward” to operate sustainably.
Despite its popularity – the platform The number of users has increased significantly Since the pandemic shutdowns several years ago – Twitch has still struggled to turn a profit. Its pivot to prioritizing ad revenue, which has been a point of contention between viewers and streamers, has not been fruitful; Bloomberg reported that the company remains unprofitable nearly a decade after its acquisition by Amazon. Several Twitch executives left in December, Including the Chief Revenue Officer.
Twitch faces huge operating costs to support live streaming content on such a large scale. In 2022 Blog postEach large-scale Twitch streamer costs the company about $1,000 per month, Clancy said, citing Amazon Web Service’s interactive video pricing.
“Delivering high-definition, low-latency live video that is always available in almost every corner of the world is expensive,” Clancy wrote.