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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

#441

Post by hildegrin19 »

bjclark wrote: post #327
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 the founder and cto of a niche streaming platform. You don’t need to be google scale. You do need a different business model.

"Niche" is very different. Lower membership and higher premiums, usually. I don't suppose you'd like to offer anything further about your niche or your membership base, would you?

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

#442

Post by dathinab »

scarface_74 wrote: post #394
dathinab wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

no AWS _is_ a different company then Twitch, Amazone owns Twitch but Twitch isn't Amazone. and yes you can always negotiate rates but it has to be in some "reasonable boundaries" so Twitch still has to pay Amazone and Amazone can't just set the price to just the cost Amazone has, even less so below.

This is not in any way shape or form true. When you go into the internal “phone tool” if you work for Amazon, AWS, Twitch etc you still eventually get to the same CEO. (Former AWS employer)

you are aware that twitch still has its own CEO right?

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

#443

Post by scarface_74 »

dathinab wrote: post #442
scarface_74 wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not in any way shape or form true. When you go into the internal “phone tool” if you work for Amazon, AWS, Twitch etc you still eventually get to the same CEO. (Former AWS employer)

you are aware that twitch still has its own CEO right?

And Jassy was also the “CEO” of AWS before he became the CEO of Amazon.

And when I went to my phone tool, he still reported to Bezos at first

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

#444

Post by jamesfinlayson »

bombcar wrote: post #395
mnky9800n wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience it's typically a good idea to keep the bean counters out of things. Recently buying computing hardware I selected an American provider for my eu based lab. After paying the invoices the bean counters then asked if I could get the money back because they didn't want to pay VAT. I said feel free to ask for the money back yourself I'm happy with the purchase that you already approved. They refused and k…

Entire industries exist to bypass the bean counters. Arguably much of SaaS just is that. But you can make a comfortable living as a small VAR by just buying product and charging more to companies for it in the way their bean counters like to see it. $1000 item with $8 VAT line item? Unacceptable. $2000 same item with no VAT? Perfectly cromulent.

> Arguably much of SaaS just is that.

Yep - at a previous job I think there was some expensive tool that would never have been approved, but someone decided to buy it from AWS Marketplace instead where it was just a rounding error in the total monthly AWS spend.

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

#445

Post by Tmpod »

covercash wrote: post #93
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…

Twitch just announced a partnership with Nvidia at CES to allow streamers to encode multiple versions of their stream on their own PC and push them to Twitch. Previously, only partner/affiliate streams had transcoded streams at various levels of quality. That might cut back on the amount of transcoding Twitch has to do server side… They also said they’ll be supporting AV1 and NVENC codecs soon which can help reduce b…

> They also said they’ll be supporting AV1 and NVENC codecs soon

You mean HEVC (x265)? I believe NVENC is just nvidia's hardware accelerated implementations of existing codecs.

Anyways, that sounds really interesting for both streamers who want more control over their streams' encoding, but obviously for Twitch, as it saves them compute power (though upping their intake bandwith?).

I wonder how feasible it would be for most streamers. Pushing one stream vs 3 or so is quite the difference.

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

#446

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

stets wrote: post #115
SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #4

Hmm, so they’re starting to feel the effects of ZIRP on pause, good. But they’re also still in the mindset that they need to prevent boobs at all costs. Say what you want about the anything, ZIRP being on pause is about the greatest thing going right now. Unless you’re trying to buy a home I guess.

They are preventing boobs? Have you ever taken a look at Twitch's Pools, Hot Tubs, and Beaches category? They are complicit in encouraging showing boobs

You must have missed all the recent news and controversy lately.

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

#447

Post by johnnyanmac »

blasphemers wrote: post #127
edgyquant wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, rather, they are paying what they think are some of the best people in the world not to go out and start the competition.

No company actually does this, they are just bloated because they have so much money and managers rank/value is determined by how many people they manage.

They explicitly did this in the 00's. Some circles of top companies over a decade ago were convicted for having anti-poaching agreements amongst each other.

May be a bit different now (as others said, free money is gone, so competition cropping up is much harder to do and much less a concern), but the tech boom of the 2000's very much worried about becoming the next MySpace to some startup's Facebook. That's why tech salaries became so high to begin with.

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

#448

Post by stefan_ »

JoeOfTexas wrote: post #435
stefan_ wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The infrastructure is bought from Amazon, who in turn own them. Makes you wonder if it’s actually unprofitable, on the whole.

If its anything like my corp, Twitch only gets a small discount, if any at all. It's expensive regardless. Network bandwidth alone is probably in the $20+ million a month range.

Well, that's sort of the problem here right; yes at AWS retail you are paying $20 million a month for traffic, but the cost to AWS isn't anywhere near that, in fact how AWS charges for traffic doesn't match to how it incurs costs at all. And in general having desirable services like Twitch and of course being ginormously huge means people want to peer with you and you have more leverage in those peerings, making them cheaper.

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

#449

Post by Tiktaalik »

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.

so much of game dev is work for hire that if the big publicly traded companies tap the breaks on things for a few months to mull over market direction or to make their stock price look better, it doesn't mean anything for the publishers, but results in a wave of game cancelations and layoffs for the tiny work for hire studios way down the line.

That's what is happening right now.

May well be that in 2025/2026 we see a light year of releases.

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

#450

Post by Tiktaalik »

local_crmdgeon wrote: post #411
minimaxir wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Spiderman 2. What the parent is referencing is things we know from the Insomniac leak.
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