In a recent statement by Andy Jassy, CEO at Amazon, it was announced that an additional 9,000 positions will be terminated at Amazon within the next few weeks. This report comes months after the original ball-drop that was Amazon’s decision to eliminate 18,000 positions, which was revealed in January. As a result of these recent layoffs, Twitch will lose 400 of their own employees.
New Twitch CEO, Dan Clancy, expressed his remorse for the situation, alluding to their early-pandemic traffic and the decline since then: “Like many companies, our business has been impacted by the current macroeconomic environment, and user and revenue growth has not kept pace with our expectations.”
Twitch, which was bought by Amazon in 2014, saw substantial growth in the summer of 2020, when we were all stuck inside. Since the decline of the pandemic, the live-streaming service has lost about 1 million users and though their numbers have remained stagnant since then, they are struggling on other fronts. Many of their biggest content creators, such as Ludwig and Valkyrae, have moved on to Youtube Streaming, where they claim the contracts and professional treatment were both exceptionally better than Twitch’s offers.
A few days prior to the statement that Twitch would be losing 400 employees, Emmett Shear, founder and former CEO of the live-streaming service, released a statement that he would be stepping down from the position to spend time with his family.
Unfortunately, Twitch is unlikely to ever reach the numbers that they did early-pandemic, and without the astronomically high revenue the live-streaming service was raking in at the time, it only makes sense for Twitch to eliminate positions. Hopefully, the uncertain conditions of the economy will allow services like Twitch to adapt to the ever changing world of the tech industry.