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Twitch to Cut 500 Employees, About 35% of Staff

bloomberg.com

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

#411

Post by local_crmdgeon »

minimaxir wrote: post #81
TillE wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The AAA gaming economics are a different issue: budgets have ballooned so much that it's near impossible to hit breakeven. The games you mentioned are extreme outliers ( no one expected BG3 to do as well as it did), and there have been a number of studio-killing bombs this year.

Can you name them? I have a lot of anger at the AAA studios

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

#412

Post by rchaud »

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…

Ad-free....for now.

Like how Uber sold itself on "no need to tip" and there's a big fat tip screen on the App.

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

#413

Post by rchaud »

ls612 wrote: post #211
prox wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are really interested then Twitch Turbo disables ads for about 10 a month,

If you are really interested and also don’t want to spend money there are Tampermonkey scripts which will solve twitch ads too.

You wouldn't steal an AWS compute credit.... /s

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

#414

Post by rchaud »

matchbok wrote: post #68
bananapub wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Something called hard work?

I'm almost expecting a mention of bootstraps, and not of the CSS framework variety.

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

#415

Post by rchaud »

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.

I remember watching a televised Starcraft tournament in 2001 in Korea. Maybe there just isn't a big market for it outside of a few countries. It's not at all in its infancy. The big money is in real sports.

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

#416

Post by msie »

genmud wrote: post #268
timr wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about "Google scale", but you definitely need to be able to peer to get the costs under control. That requires a certain level of investment (on the order of millions of dollars in hardware/datacenter costs), plus the human relationships to get the peering agreements done. Twitch absolutely had that in place, so it's not really fair to compare it to a hobby project and conclude the business model doesn't…

I feel like free peering is a thing of the past. Verizon/Comcast killed it by forcing people to pay for peering relations about a decade ago.

How much of charging for network traffic profit? I imagine a lot.

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

#417

Post by lakomen »

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…

What are you talking about?

Every single Twitch streamer in my list is profitable. Twitch gets 50% of each subscription. 1 subscription per streamer. You have to subscribe to each streamer individually. Egress is a fixed cost. You pay flat rate for 10GE or 40GE or 100GE. Then people buy virtual currency (bits) so they can "support" their streamers. Some people dump huge amounts of money to be displayed on top of some monthly donation list. I've seen some guy dump $5k every few minutes to some travel streamer. I guess that's what the *coin money gets spent on.

Twitch aka Amazon is surely not losing money.

Then add the annoying ads every so often. Sometimes up to 20 ads in a row. Ridiculous.

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

#418

Post by ansible »

huytersd wrote: post #308
benwilber0 wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Several years ago I cobbled together all the pieces to make a live video streaming website [1] like Twitch.tv, et al. It's impossible to actually run at any kind of scale without being an ISP or Google-scale peer. Not to mention the enormous amount of DMCAs when people are trying to stream live sports, Pay-per-view, etc. It was fun to play with it for a couple months. But there's no business here. Twitch.tv is also f…

I’m sure something like this already exists but can’t there be a distributed streaming platform that pays people fractions of a penny for hosting (all/part) of a video like bitorrent. I’m sure there’s some cryptocurrency equivalent. Or even better some combination of CDNs and distributed bitorrent like streaming. At the very least, it should atleast ease the burden of massive central hosting.

That might work for pre-recorded video, but I don't think it would be stable and reliable for live streams.

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

#419

Post by stevenwliao »

anonymousab wrote: post #149
symlinkk wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like a win for Twitch - you were costing them money and not giving anything back

They may have been paying for subscriptions, bit rewards/redemptions, prime, etc. Ads are only one source of Twitch's revenue. Twitch started showing a purple "disable your ad blocker" screen when a block of ads failed to run. I think they probably would have made a lot more money and reduced a lot of churn by simply advertising Turbo instead, which many users don't even know is an option.

Twitch subs remove ads for subscribed channels, so OP doesn't buy subs.

Which is the more likely scenario?

1. OP buys bits and throws them at their favorite streamers despite not being willing to pay for subscriptions.

2. OP pays nothing for Twitch and doesn't watch a single ad.

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

#420

Post by Supermancho »

fer wrote: post #405
kenhwang wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I found this: https://scaleyourapp.com/live-video-streaming-infrastructure...
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