On Jan. 9, it was first reported that Twitch would be letting go of 500 members of its staff this week, and now an internal memo from Twitch’s CEO Dan Clany has confirmed this news.
Just over 500 employees at Twitch have lost their jobs as the company struggles to become more sustainable, reads the memo shared first with employees, then via the company’s blog. “This decision, while incredibly difficult and painful, is necessary to ensure that we can continue to serve our streamers sustainably without impacting their ability to support their careers on Twitch.”
Twitch says for the last 12 months, it has been working towards further sustainability as a business. To achieve this, it has cut costs and made decisions like letting go of staff to foster more sustainability and longevity for the streaming platform.
“Last year we paid out over $1 billion to streamers,” the blog post shared by Twitch reads. “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.”
The news of these layoffs is sadly not surprising given the state of the gaming industry right now, which has continued to be plagued by layoffs. As recently as this week, Unity announced it would be cutting almost 2,000 staff members as part of a “company reset.”
Twitch still remains the largest live-streaming service today, and it remains to be seen how these layoffs will impact the company and business going forward.
