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Twitch to Cut 500 Employees, About 35% of Staff

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Re: Twitch to Cut 500 Employees, About 35% of Staff

#41

Unity and Twitch doing massive layoffs to start the year? I feel somewhat nervous being in video game adjacent SaaS

I saw some hysterical Twitter thread a couple days ago claiming that the end of AAA games was nigh. There are some weird vibes out there.

It's absolutely true that there have been a ton of layoffs in the past ~12 months. But I've seen zero evidence of actual sales slowing down. 2023 saw a ton of big hits, from Zelda to Diablo to Baldur's Gate.

Re: Twitch to Cut 500 Employees, About 35% of Staff

#42
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> attrition, drop in quality, services turn shitty, loss of revenue, repeat Execs are lauded for cutting costs, parasitically enrich themselves on the carcass of a once-productive business, jump ship to a new host before it all comes crashing down, repeat.

Sounds like a sweet gig, how do I land one?

In the immortal words of George Carlin: "It's a big club, and you ain’t in it."

Re: Twitch to Cut 500 Employees, About 35% of Staff

#43
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> attrition, drop in quality, services turn shitty, loss of revenue, repeat Execs are lauded for cutting costs, parasitically enrich themselves on the carcass of a once-productive business, jump ship to a new host before it all comes crashing down, repeat.

Some execs have already jumped ship. From the article: "In the final months of 2023, several top executives announced their departures, including Twitch’s chief product officer, chief customer officer and chief content officer. Twitch also lost its chief revenue officer, who worked on Twitch from within Amazon’s Ads unit."

Funny, I read this just recently.

https://adrianco.medium.com/signs-that-its-time-to-leave-a-c...

Re: Twitch to Cut 500 Employees, About 35% of Staff

#44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even in late-stage capitalism, you do a 5-10% staff cut at most to trim the fat so-to-speak. A 35% cut indicates something with the business is fundamentally wrong. EDIT: I apologize for the completely unintentional derail.

[flagged]

Hence the implied "something with the business is fundamentally wrong".

Re: Twitch to Cut 500 Employees, About 35% of Staff

#46

I don't get it. From an outside perspective, it feels like they must be raking in the cash - they take a large cut from subscribers and the number of ads is crazy. Viewership growth seems good [1]. The product seems solid and well-built. The demand is clearly there. Serving live video is obviously expensive, but curious if that is really the biggest component (other than personnel). Would be cool if some industry ins…

1. I think the infrastructure costs is probably more than you think. It’s probably the single biggest line item. They have to encode every video stream to multiple formats, and then deliver it globally.

2. The core product is pretty mature.

3. Elon raised the bar for how large of a staff cut you can make.

4. Most of their revenue is split with content creators.

5. They lost their CEO about a year ago. New guy has to make his mark.

Re: Twitch to Cut 500 Employees, About 35% of Staff

#48

I don't get it. From an outside perspective, it feels like they must be raking in the cash - they take a large cut from subscribers and the number of ads is crazy. Viewership growth seems good [1]. The product seems solid and well-built. The demand is clearly there. Serving live video is obviously expensive, but curious if that is really the biggest component (other than personnel). Would be cool if some industry ins…

Did they have a hiring spree during the pandemic like all the other tech companies and now returning to the mean?

Re: Twitch to Cut 500 Employees, About 35% of Staff

#49
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> attrition, drop in quality, services turn shitty, loss of revenue, repeat Execs are lauded for cutting costs, parasitically enrich themselves on the carcass of a once-productive business, jump ship to a new host before it all comes crashing down, repeat.

Sounds like a sweet gig, how do I land one?

ask sam altman what he did - I still can't figure out how he went from "startup that went nowhere" to "hand out other people's money at YC until paulg fires him" to "CEO of openai".

Re: Twitch to Cut 500 Employees, About 35% of Staff

#50

I don't get it. From an outside perspective, it feels like they must be raking in the cash - they take a large cut from subscribers and the number of ads is crazy. Viewership growth seems good [1]. The product seems solid and well-built. The demand is clearly there. Serving live video is obviously expensive, but curious if that is really the biggest component (other than personnel). Would be cool if some industry ins…

I think viewership peaked in 2021 and has been flat or down since then. [1][2][3]

I know some of my friends watch Twitch less because the ad policy became toxic.

[1] https://twitchtracker.com/statistics

[2] https://sullygnome.com/longtermstats

[3] https://streamscharts.com/overview#:~:text=Twitch%20growth%2...

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