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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

#81

Post by minimaxir »

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.

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.

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

#82

Post by sneed_chucker »

neom wrote: post #58
huytersd wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Can't speak for other places, but at Meta everyone effectively has a free GPT4 subscription.

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

#83

Post by echelon »

joegibbs wrote: post #61
Brybry wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

What happened to the ad policy?

You can't show female-presenting cleavage, for one. They change their "attire policy" on a near-weekly basis.

Is it exploitative? Empowering? Toxic? Who knows! Everyone argues about everything.

Twitch is ban happy with anything even remotely controversial. Things that can be suggestive or comments that can be interpreted as offensive will garner a ban. And they hate anything even remotely sex-related.

Honestly, this stuff needs to move P2P. Platforms are indecisive and fickle. Just a month ago, they flip-flopped on their policy in just two days [1]. And it happens time and time again.

I don't blame the ad networks (after all Twitter had all of the world government and news orgs plus sex and nudity). I blame the Twitch leadership.

If you follow Twitch, the entire leadership is embroiled in the kind of drama you'd expect in a middle or high school.

The community is moving to mostly Kick [2] and somewhat to YouTube Gaming.

[1] https://decrypt.co/209998/twitch-walks-back-changes-after-su...

[2] https://kick.com/

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

#84

Post by aaomidi »

matrix_overload wrote: post #73
madcadmium wrote: post #3

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

People fundamentally misunderstand how this works. For a large enough product company there's always a years-long queue of feature requests, fixes, optimizations, and other things to do. All of it will never get done! The doable amount of highest-priority items will get picked through a combination of pressures from different people and departments, and will get more or less implemented. If you cut the workforce by 5…

That is true for some teams, not true for others.

I've never seen a layoff actually care about what team they're removing from when it comes to ENG.

In this case it's probably 500 across twitch, which for some teams is going to be devastating.

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

#85

Post by throwboatyface »

dexwiz wrote: post #56
niceice wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Farmers protested the enclosure of the commons, Luddites protested the industrial revolution, trade unionists protested for a 40 hour work week.

It's not foolish to imagine the world could be better.

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

#86

Post by refulgentis »

matrix_overload wrote: post #73
madcadmium wrote: post #3

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

People fundamentally misunderstand how this works. For a large enough product company there's always a years-long queue of feature requests, fixes, optimizations, and other things to do. All of it will never get done! The doable amount of highest-priority items will get picked through a combination of pressures from different people and departments, and will get more or less implemented. If you cut the workforce by 5…

The problem is people misunderstand how this works, so none of that happens. Instead the competition goes to 11 while work is cut by upper managers, leading to "non-business decisions" made by lower managers to cling to their bit, leading to less productivity both in absolute & unit terms.

Also, I think A) is a little bit of red herring designed to create agency and opportunity where there is none. If we mean "negotiate" in an airy high-minded vague sense of "negotiate but don't", sure. At the end of the day these moves, whether intended to or not, leave less room for negotiation.

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

#87

Post by pb7 »

thih9 wrote: post #54

Weird to see layoffs at the beginning of the year, when fresh budgets and plans are availiable. Then again, since this is happening this early, this is probably a 2023 decision.

If they had done this in December, people would be outraged that they're laying off right before the holidays. January is fine (if one thinks layoffs are fine in general).

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

#88

Post by londons_explore »

raz32dust wrote: post #19

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…

> they take a large cut from subscribers

I'm surprised they don't have a 'choose your own revshare' setting, allowing the creator choose how much to pay twitch.

Obviously twitch will recommend more profitable creators, so you get a kind of 'race to the top', with creators offering twitch a larger and larger revshare, knowing that unless they do, their audience size will dwindle.

It also encourages creators to come in from other platforms - if you already have an audience and just want to extract money from them, then you don't need to be in twitches recommendations and can choose a low revshare to milk the subscribers.

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

#89

Post by edgyquant »

londons_explore wrote: post #78
asdfasdflkj211 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You answered your own question. Twitch is solid and well-built. It doesn't need an army of well-paid engineers to maintain it and isn't seeing a great ROI on new features. Some companies repurpose all, many or some engineers when the spreadsheet says to, others fire them wholesale.

Not many people realise this. Engineers build stuff. When your product is feature complete, you can get rid of most of them. Big tech companies keeping tens of thousands of engineers on staff despite their core product not seeing substantial changes for years are just wasting money.

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.

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

#90

Post by OkayPhysicist »

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"?

Basically, it's the theory that capitalist economies demand continually increasing growth, even increasing rates of growth, in order to remain stable enough to stay hegemonic. The industrial revolution, through most of the 20th century, exhibited this growth, driving capitalism to be the dominant (eventually only) economic system on earth.

Unfortunately, growth is hard, and it slows down. Over time, providing meaningful improvements to the lives of the participants in the economic system fails to keep up with the demands of growth, and you start to see the system going full ouroboros, consuming all the positive impact its created in the lives of its participants in a downward spiral of exploitation and value extraction until there's nothing left. The period of time after the inversion from "making people's lives better" to "making people's lives worse" is "late-stage capitalism", equivocating it to cancer or other terminal diseases.

Personally, I'm more of a "threshold events" theorist, and that enshittification is just reversion to the mean, but that's the pitch.

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