We’re hardly a week into 2024 and we’re already trending to beat last year’s record of game industry job losses. Yesterday, Twitch announced layoffs for 500 employees, a massive 35% of the streaming website’s staff.

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The layoffs were announced in a post on the Twitch blog this morning. You can read the message from CEO Dan Clancy to those affected below:

Team,

Today I have some incredibly difficult news to share. As you all know, we have worked hard over the last year to run our business as sustainably as possible. Unfortunately, we still have work to do to rightsize our company and I regret having to share that we are taking the painful step to reduce our headcount by just over 500 people across Twitch. This will be a very hard day. Our service exists to empower communities to create, together, and every single one of you has played a vital role in fostering our community and furthering that mission.

I know many of you are wondering why this is happening. Over the last year, we’ve been working to build a more sustainable business so that Twitch will be here for the long run and throughout the year we have cut costs and made many decisions to be more efficient. Unfortunately, despite these efforts, it has become clear that our organization is still meaningfully larger than it needs to be given the size of our business. Last year we paid out over $1 billion to streamers. So while the Twitch business remains strong, for some time now the organization has been sized based upon where we optimistically expect our business to be in 3 or more years, not where we’re at today. As with many other companies in the tech space, we are now sizing our organization based upon the current scale of our business and conservative predictions of how we expect to grow in the future.

This decision, while incredibly difficult and painful, is necessary to ensure that we can continue to serve our streamers sustainably without impacting their ability to support their careers on Twitch. Part of what makes this so difficult is the passion that so many of you share for the Twitch community, and the hard work you’ve put into serving our streamers.

I want to close with my sincerest apology to everyone who is leaving Twitch. You are some of the most talented, committed, and creative people I have ever worked with. Thank you for everything you’ve done to help us build Twitch and foster our community.

We are all here because we believe in the power of Twitch and our community – and while our mission is far from over, right now our focus is on taking care of each other. I am always grateful for how well you all support and show up for one another during our best and most difficult moments.

– Dan

What’s left to say about these layoffs at this point? At this point, we’re writing up job cut headlines up at least once a week, often more. It sucks. There’s no other way to say it. Hundreds of people getting put out of work in an industry that’s so difficult to get into in the first place never gets easier to see. We can’t predict the future, but as of right now, it seems like there’s no end in sight.

Clancy announced that he’ll host a livestream on the official Twitch channel at 1pm PST/4pm EST/5am HKT tomorrow, January 11, to speak to the community regarding the layoffs. It’s a nice gesture in the midst of an unfortunate situation, but it’s a bit of a band-aid on a broken leg.

If anything substantial comes of Clancy’s community address, we’ll be sure to let our readers know.

Source: Twitch

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