(San Francisco) Twitch, platform for streaming of Amazon’s video games, will lay off 500 people, as part of vast job cuts carried out by the online distribution giant, which also announced hundreds of positions cut at Prime Video and MGM Studios.
“I regret having to announce that we are making the painful decision to reduce Twitch’s workforce by just over 500 people,” said Dan Clancy, CEO of Twitch, in a letter sent to employees on Wednesday, and published in an article on the company blog.
According to several media, this represents a third of the online gaming platform’s workforce.
These job cuts, which the Bloomberg agency had initially reported, are announced at a time when Twitch is experiencing an exodus of senior executives.
Its parent company Amazon, which bought the platform in 2014 for around $842 million, announced last year future job cuts on an unprecedented scale for the group.
Since then, the online gaming platform has experienced difficulties. It even recently announced that it would cease its activity in South Korea, where it had nevertheless established a strong presence among players, from February, due to excessively high internet network costs.
“Over the past year, we have worked to build a more sustainable business […]we have reduced costs and made many decisions to be more efficient,” Dan Clancy wrote in his letter to employees.
Before deploring that “unfortunately, despite these efforts, it [soit] became evident that [leur] organization is still much larger than would be necessary given the size of [l’] business “.
Twitch presents itself as the largest global platform for streaming on the theme of video games, with more than 31 million visitors on average per day.
Cuts within Prime and MGM
In total, Amazon announced the elimination of 27,000 positions, and specified in March that Twitch was one of the targeted activities.
In this context, Amazon also announced on Wednesday the elimination of “several hundred positions”, without further details, in its Prime Video division and within the legendary Hollywood studio MGM, purchased for $8.45 billion in 2021.
“This is a difficult decision that neither my management team nor I take lightly,” company entertainment chief Mike Hopkins wrote in a Wednesday email to staff and published by media outlets. Americans.
“Today we will begin contacting colleagues affected by these job cuts. Notifications will be sent shortly,” a process which should be completed, globally, at the end of the week, it is specified.
The group had recruited extensively during the COVID-19 pandemic to respond to the explosion in demand, thus doubling its global workforce between early 2020 and early 2022.
Amazon is far from being the only tech company to have laid off workers last year, as the entire sector saw a wave of job cuts.