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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

#401

Post by raxxorraxor »

lchengify wrote: post #92

Not mentioned in the article but definitely the elephant in the room: The rise of TikTok streaming [1] TikTok doesn't focus on gamers, but attention is finite. TikTok surpassed Twitch a while ago in revenue and it's accelerated since then. TikTok + Youtube (very profitable) makes Twitch at best a flat third place. Not a great business to be in when ZIRP ends. > Nine years after Amazon’s acquisition of the company, th…

There is a difference in the target demographic though. Even if the most successful channels aren't about videogames, it is the target audience. That is different for TikTok and Youtube with heavy implication about how profitable advertising can be.

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

#402

Post by 93po »

VirusNewbie wrote: post #97
bitmasher9 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>3. Elon raised the bar for how large of a staff cut you can make. Did he? Their revenue is way down, and they've had a lot of downtime. Unlike Netflix, they make most of their money on ads, not subscriptions, so more downtime is more money lost. They're also on a huge hiring spree right now. Go look at how many roles they're hiring for. I don't think they'd be hiring that much if everything was fine and dandy.

> they've had a lot of downtime

Twitter is possibly the website most well known for downtime, and has been since literally the beginning. There's no real measure for whether it's true it's down more than usual lately, and sensationalist journalism and anecdotal reports from people with an axe to grind aren't really reliable.

The closest thing I can think of is looking at Google trends, which shows that "twitter down" is pretty consistent over the years:

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=t...

There's a spike in Nov 2022 when the layoffs happened, but again that's not indicative that it's especially bad - just that people were especially whiny about it or anticipating it would be bad

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

#403

Post by azemetre »

gverrilla wrote: post #300
coffeebeqn wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Esports so far has been a terrible business. No one wants to pay PPV for vidya games when you can watch so much of that for free. And most orgs have failed to find any real means of revenue. Just one example the Overwatch league that required millions invested to own a team is being shut down

Esports is at it's infancy, but increasing in size and developing. But yeah they would have to innovate, and would be a challenge. And have a focused strategy. Is there any other segment where Twitch currently holds an advantageous position? Counter-strike majors are mainly watched through twitch even though steam offers in-game streams.

Esports has been a thing since the 90s with Quake and Unreal tournaments.

I agree with the other poster, Esports isn’t a massive money maker like how the world championships for scrabble aren’t a massive money maker either.

It’s extremely niche and the audience demographics are mostly poor, it’s not a boon you think it is.

You can be smart about it like Valve and Riot or you can be stupid about it like Blizzard and Faze. Although Faze seems to be smart in how stupid the execution was.

If esports couldn’t make it during the pandemic, I doubt it would make it now when money is very expensive.

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

#404

Post by kobalsky »

TillE wrote: post #41
coffeebeqn wrote: post #27

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.

> that the end of AAA games was nigh

this kind of running-it-dry is what is killing "AAA" (big quotes) games: https://en.as.com/meristation/news/ubisoft-has-11-assassins-...

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

#405

Post by fer »

kenhwang wrote: post #148
lchengify wrote: post #92

Not mentioned in the article but definitely the elephant in the room: The rise of TikTok streaming [1] TikTok doesn't focus on gamers, but attention is finite. TikTok surpassed Twitch a while ago in revenue and it's accelerated since then. TikTok + Youtube (very profitable) makes Twitch at best a flat third place. Not a great business to be in when ZIRP ends. > Nine years after Amazon’s acquisition of the company, th…

I've worked for a major streaming company and with several other major streaming companies (including Twitch); I'd like to think I have a pretty good understanding of streaming costs. > Youtube (very profitable) The "very" part is probably not true, and that's with Google's massive advertising empire behind it. There's a good reason why Google is going so hard at anti-adblocker initiatives. You can't run a profitable…

> I think Amazon was betting that AWS efficiencies could push Twitch into profitability, guess not.

I don't think any significant chunk of the Twitch infra runs on AWS.

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

#406

Post by BobaFloutist »

andirk wrote: post #262
scarface_74 wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So they found the “greater fool”? Mark Cuban also sold broadcast .com to Yahoo for 5.7 billion

That broadcast.com to Yahoo and Tom selling Myspace to Murdoch are 2 of my favorite flop acquisitions. Honorable mention: Digg selling its soul to their own sales team. However, Geocities to Yahoo is one of my least fave.

Tumblr to Yahoo for 1.1 billion in the hopes it becomes "The new PDF" was pretty good too.

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

#407

Post by SleepilyLimping »

dathinab wrote: post #266
wozniacki wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also not mentioned is the recent rise of Ad-Free ( yes completely AD-FREE as in not a single ad ever! ) platforms like KICK.com [1][2] Amouranth used to stream exclusively on Twitch.com but now has moved mostly to Kick.com and streams the majority of her time there. In this respect, Twitch's draconian content policing needs mentioning. People would receive week-long bans for unnamed reasons or super petty things. The…

Kick has the same cost or more then Twitch (they use the exact same infrastructure under the hood,it's a service sold by Amazone to Twitch and others). They saved some cost on building the UI etc. by well semi-stealing it from Twitch after a leak but that's just a saving bootstrapping cost not long term operation cost. When it comes to general advertisement friendliness they are far worse then Twitch, i.e. where Twit…

Kick is narrowly avoiding the Truth Social/Gab "this is the platform where all the people banned from Twitter are" stink by basically throwing money at non-problematic streamers until they can't refuse the payout. The streamers saw what happened with Ninja during the Mixer shutdown (getting bought out of his contract, going straight back to Twitch) and probably want that to happen to them.

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

#408

Post by SleepilyLimping »

gurchik wrote: post #162
dangus wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And here’s the other thing: why doesn’t an Amazon prime subscription remove ads? Is there even a way to buy an ad-free experience? I’m not a heavy Twitch user so maybe I’m wrong but I’m struggling to think of a killer feature of Twitch or an aspect of the overall experience that’s better than YouTube Live videos. At least with YouTube I can watch ad-free with a Premium plan.

> why doesn’t an Amazon prime subscription remove ads? Is there even a way to buy an ad-free experience? First of all, an Amazon Prime subscription soon won't even remove ads from Amazon Video, so why would it be any different for Twitch? Second of all, a channel subscription (through Amazon Prime or otherwise) removes ads from that channel. If you want an ad free experience across the whole site, Twitch Turbo is $11…

Prime USED to remove ads site-wide, but that was shuttered. Turbo will probably go away sometime in the future as well, as it's mostly there to offer a product for developing markets where Prime doesn't exist yet.

I don't subscribe to any channels because Turbo exists; they probably don't like that.

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

#409

Post by TheRealPomax »

dathinab wrote: post #233
TheRealPomax wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Live streaming 1080p 60fps video to a channel with even just a few hundred viewers is a staggering amount of data that you need to push out. Multiply that by thousands of simultaneous streams, and the numbers don't look good. Because even though "Amazon" might be able to afford to send out all that data, "a subdivision owned by Amazon" still has to balance the budget and show that it can cover the cost for its slice…

I thin calling it a subdevvision is already an overstatement I think it's not even that. Amazone provides something like a "live streaming infrastructure service" which they sell to Twitch and others (including the competition like Kick). For them buying Twitch was good as it allowed them to thoroughly test that service somewhat "in-house", have an initial customer for it to show what it can do etc. But now that this…

Not sure I understand the start here: Twitch Interactive is literally a wholly owned subsidiary of Amazon, in the same way that Ring and MGM+ are owned by Amazon. "Clever accounting for tax purposes" aside, it doesn't "pay Amazon" it is Amazon.

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

#410

Post by local_crmdgeon »

wozniacki wrote: post #210
lchengify wrote: post #92

Not mentioned in the article but definitely the elephant in the room: The rise of TikTok streaming [1] TikTok doesn't focus on gamers, but attention is finite. TikTok surpassed Twitch a while ago in revenue and it's accelerated since then. TikTok + Youtube (very profitable) makes Twitch at best a flat third place. Not a great business to be in when ZIRP ends. > Nine years after Amazon’s acquisition of the company, th…

Also not mentioned is the recent rise of Ad-Free ( yes completely AD-FREE as in not a single ad ever! ) platforms like KICK.com [1][2] Amouranth used to stream exclusively on Twitch.com but now has moved mostly to Kick.com and streams the majority of her time there. In this respect, Twitch's draconian content policing needs mentioning. People would receive week-long bans for unnamed reasons or super petty things. The…

Does this read like an ad to anyone else?
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