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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

#51

Post by seoulmetro »

fivre wrote: post #33
wilde wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right before this they chose to exit Korea. https://blog.twitch.tv/en/2023/12/05/an-update-on-twitch-in-...

that has nothing to do with staffing. Korea has a uniquely hostile ISP market where service providers want to charge foreign services ridiculous amounts (versus peering agreements in most markets) for access to Korean consumer networks

Korea has a philosophy of local conglomerates first and foreign companies only existing if they prop the local conglomerate up.

It's a very good strategy as the Korean market is lucrative and the Korean companies have opportunities to spread worldwide. (they just suck at it)

Twitch got sent a foreigner-tax and didn't pay it, that's all. Korea already has a thriving version of Twitch called AfreecaTV. (edit: Oh it's not that thriving on their international site, maybe Korean site is better.)

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

#52

Post by Angostura »

IshanMi wrote: post #5

For companies like Twitch or Kick, how much do layoffs like these affect the actual streamers? (Like are the layoffs usually accompanied by them reducing the streamer's revenue share, or things like that?)

It can affect it quite a lot, I think if things like Twitch Rivals, competitions etc etc are dropped or downsized.

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

#53

Post by iwontberude »

chalsprhebaodu wrote: post #32
minimaxir wrote: post #24

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]

How do you counter the argument by restating a premise of their argument? Are you implying Twitch is profitable because I'm pretty sure it is not.

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

#55

Post by _jal »

thot_experiment wrote: post #29
edgyquant wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Sell your soul. You have to be capable of looking at people and erasing their humanity/removing your empathy.

Necessary but not sufficient.

Also, don't confuse empathy and sympathy - you need to extinguish the latter, but the former is incredibly important to your ability to play suckers.

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

#56

Post by dexwiz »

niceice wrote: post #39
minimaxir wrote: post #24

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.

What's "late-stage capitalism"?

Its modern jargon that refers to multinational, corporate focused, globalized markets. Its gone through a few definitions over the last century, but most recently its been used by the anti-work movement to deride a culture that has all but abandoned individual people in favor of the ultra wealthy. A culture where greed and money are the only virtues and all choices are driven by the bottom line.

Jokes on them, that's how its always been.

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

#57

Post by hnuser123456 »

niceice wrote: post #39
minimaxir wrote: post #24

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.

What's "late-stage capitalism"?

An implication that capitalism is a fatal disease rather than a way to efficiently exchange value.

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

#58

Post by neom »

huytersd wrote: post #30
madcadmium wrote: post #3

The remaining employee's workloads are about to increase 50%

They’ll probably give them all chatGPT subscriptions and ask them to deal with it. If that goes well they’ll probably cut the staff in half again.

Not an engineer so I'm curious... Is this actually a thing that's happening in Eng orgs these days?

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

#59

Post by minimaxir »

pcurve wrote: post #47

1600 ish down to 1100. That's a big percentage cut, but not a big number cut. I'm surprised they're not just letting natural attrition run its course.

When is 500 employees not a big number cut?

The WARN Act calls mass layoffs at just 50 employees. https://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/WARN-FAQs.html

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

#60

Post by musha68k »

DivisionSol wrote: post #11
shrewduser wrote: post #9

Any idea why south korea is particularly cost prohibitive? i would assume twitch would be very keen to have a presence there.

Per: https://blog.twitch.tv/en/2023/12/05/an-update-on-twitch-in-... Ultimately, the cost to operate Twitch in Korea is prohibitively expensive and we have spent significant effort working to reduce these costs so that we could find a way for the Twitch business to remain in Korea. First, we experimented with a peer-to-peer model for source quality. Then, we adjusted source quality to a maximum of 720p. While we have…

Would be interesting to understand how far they got with the p2p experiments.
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