Twitch Says It Will Lay Off 400 Employees (techcrunch.com) 19
Twitch announced plans to lay off 400 employees at the company. It comes just days after longtime Twitch CEO Emmett Shear said that he would step down from the company to spend time with his family. TechCrunch reports: The layoffs will affect 400 employees at the company and were characterized as an effort to improve Twitch's business outlook in the long term. The reduction is part of Twitch parent company Amazon's plans to let go of 9,000 workers across divisions including its AWS cloud and advertising units.
"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," new Twitch CEO Dan Clancy wrote. "In order to run our business sustainably, we've made the very difficult decision to shrink the size of our workforce." While Twitch is still a platform on the upswing, both in terms of its community and its massive cultural impact, the company likely struggled to match its early pandemic highs -- a familiar story we're seeing play out across the tech industry. Further reading: What's Different About These Tech Industry Layoffs?
"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," new Twitch CEO Dan Clancy wrote. "In order to run our business sustainably, we've made the very difficult decision to shrink the size of our workforce." While Twitch is still a platform on the upswing, both in terms of its community and its massive cultural impact, the company likely struggled to match its early pandemic highs -- a familiar story we're seeing play out across the tech industry. Further reading: What's Different About These Tech Industry Layoffs?
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No no. That was your Onlyfans browser tab you were looking at.
Re:I went to twitch once, (Score:4, Insightful)
There is no difference.
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Yes there is: different kinds of joysticks.
Streaming videogames not such a hot business model (Score:2)
in an economic downturn when people have to prioritize what nonessentials they spend their hard-earned on after paying energy bills and putting food on the table. What a shocker...
Think you are confused over what a streamer is... (Score:1)
in an economic downturn when people have to prioritize what nonessentials they spend their hard-earned on after paying energy bills and putting food on the table. What a shocker...
You do realize that Amazon just runs the platform, and the streamers are separate? The streamers are all doing fine; the business that runs the platform, is a shit show. Not the same things.
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Before everyone goes why do they even need 400? (Score:4, Interesting)
Fraud.
Loss prevention and fraud prevention is a big deal with Twitch, it takes a lot of monkey brains to try and keep ahead of other monkey brains. And yes, a lot of the common is indeed automated. Content moderation, or censorship depending on who you ask on Twitch, is also a big deal. Twitch has been I wouldn't say burned, but steamed [pcgamer.com] a few times that rose to national awareness [newlinesmag.com]. They do try to put a forward approach on ensuring something doesn't jump out of the bush on them again. But it's like anything, "if you can't stay ahead at least be a quick learner."
Now outside of that, there's legal (because yeah that happens), human resources, finance, the whole department that deals with hashing out ads, content creation engagement, etc, etc, etc... After you get past all of those departments you start getting into the strictly IT side of things as yes people do "figure out ways" [washingtonpost.com]. And network admin is a really small team.
So biggest department and likely the one that'll take the most hits is investigation and loss prevention. Along with the whole content creator engagement stuff. The department of censorship within Twitch and loss prevention are seeing overlap and that means some folks are doing duties that would have been two separate things, so yeah it some consolidation, and "same caveat here, depends on who you ask" was a bit due to clean up who is doing what.
But most of the folks being fired, given how the tech industry has been going, most find another job fairly quickly. [forbes.com] There was a surge of hiring during the pandemic and now we're shaking out the excess. And shit, even the folks who might have been there for a year or two at Twitch for fraud, plenty other companies need those people's skills. Computer fraud is getting pretty intense here of late.
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Don't bet on that. There's a good chance their Amazon overlord figured those 400 positions can be replaced more or less adequately by 400 ChatGPT instances. If not adequately, then adequately enough to justify the cost saving of 400 fewer salaries to pay, and wait until the AI gets better.
If all companies preempt the arrival of AI by firing actual human workers - and believe me, ALL of them are looking at ways to slash their workforce and replace it with unpaid robotic slaves - then said workers won't find
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Bliztscaling meets reality (Score:2)
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I suspect that most of these 400 people were largely redundant. Surely, they were doing something for the company, and not just lounging around all day. Perhaps some of them were working on prototypes for theoretical new features or services that may or may not pan out, and others providing insurance that deadlines could be reliably be met (by providing more productivity than is actually needed). I don't know, I am just speculating about ways someone might be both busy and redundant.
But now that they hav
What? Only 400? (Score:2)
The only time I use Twitch... (Score:3)
... is for some games that have drops. If there is something I want I set the video the minimum resolution, turn off the audio and let the thing stream in a background tab until I get the drop. Then I close the tab. I honestly do not see the attraction of actually watching most of the shit that happens on channels.
Didn't he die? (Score:1)
Orly? (Score:1)