Twitch announced on Monday that it would lay off “just over 400 people,” part of a new round of layoffs at its parent company Amazon.
“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 CEO Dan Clancy wrote on the Twitch blog. “In order to run our business sustainably, we’ve made the very difficult decision to shrink the size of our workforce.”
Clancy has been CEO at Twitch for all of four days, following previous CEO Emmett Shear’s resignation on March 16.
Amazon announced Monday morning that it would cut an additional 9,000 jobs.
Twitch saw a dramatic upswing in its overall viewership during the 2020 COVID lockdown. As per data from Rainmaker.gg, Twitch saw a total of 1.602 billion hours watched in December, which represents just under double the content produced in Dec. 2019.
Microsoft’s decision to shut down its own streaming platform, Mixer, in June 2020 saw many of the affected creators migrate to Twitch. As a result, at its height, Twitch was producing 91% of the livestreaming content in the space.
Post-pandemic, Twitch is still the dominant livestreaming platform by an order of magnitude; to a very real extent, there’s Twitch, and then there’s everyone else. However, it has faced increasing levels of competition from Facebook, YouTube, and other forms of entertainment, in addition to legislative challenges from legacy media.
