Twitch has now confirmed a Bloomberg report of major layoffs at the company, saying that more than 500 people—roughly a third of its total workforce—are being let go.
"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," CEO Daniel Clancy wrote in a message to employees that was also shared publicly on the Twitch blog. "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.
"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 said "just over 500 people across Twitch" are being put out of work.
The news comes just two days after game engine developer Unity announced it's laying off 25% of its employees in a "company reset," and follows a year of large scale layoffs across the games and tech sectors that have affected tens of thousands of workers.
Twitch's parent company laid off 180 workers from Amazon Games in November, a relatively small number compared to the 27,000 employees it cut earlier in 2023. That mass layoff also dramatically impacted Twitch to the tune of 400 employees in March 2023, just after longtime CEO Emmett Shear departed the company after 16 years. The layoffs haven't been the only sign of trouble for Twitch: the platform just recently decided to pull out of South Korea over high network fees that forced it to operate in the country at a loss.
Despite the extent of the layoffs, Twitch streamers won't be impacted: Clancy said the cuts will "ensure that we can continue to serve our streamers sustainably without impacting their ability to support their careers on Twitch."
