Twitch says it will lay off 400 employees | Hacker News Reader

Twitch says it will lay off 400 employees

techcrunch.com

85 pointslrae40 comments

I can't say I'm surprised. Combined with Emmett's departure, Amazon is painting a picture of the belief that Twitch has hit its cap. Video games are a hits-driven business, and that goes for Twitch as well. The popularity of the service is driven by games they show, and all attempts to break that ceiling or diversify revenue simply hasn't worked. Now it's time to cut costs and squeeze existing revenue streams.

The good news is that, combined with the implosion of most esports, there may be room to innovate again. Twitch and game publishers didn't leave a lot of room for startups. If they no longer believe there's a ton of money to be made by taking risks, maybe there's an opportunity for new businesses to try again.

The "innovation" is really a retreat to Youtube. Their livestream UX can't hold a candle to Twitch or even Mixer, but you livestream on Youtube, you can slightly (re)structure your livestream and leave it up as a 2-3 hour video. Youtube's algorithm will gobble it up and spit it out on people's homepages and search results. A lot of people will watch a bit of your stream, usually the first 10-20 minutes, but the conversion rate from VOD to future live viewers is better than you'd think. And all of this despite Google's designers working hard to make the worst UI possible.

Twitch's focus on live and hostility towards VODs makes it a zero sum game, and their discoverability makes it a "the rich get richer" system. If you look at your revenue as a function of hours streamed per week, YT makes more sense for everyone but the top 1% on Twitch.

There's also a culture on Twitch of once you make it big to almost never stop streaming. That above all else I think is what informs the rich get richer system.

Twitch's hostility to VODs greatly contribute to that. You can't ever take a break and let passive income trickle in.

> The popularity of the service is driven by games they show,

The most popular content now seems to be Just Chatting and react content. These days you can get to see 4 levels of OTK streamers watching and reacting to each others' react videos, sometimes in some kind of circular dependency graph.

I was over-simplifying for the purposes of a comment, but I think my point stands.

Just Chatting is an interesting one, because it's mostly a parking space for streamers who are just engaging with chat. However, that's content that retains a streamer's audience most of the time. That's hardly the content that will draw new people to the platform. You have a few notable exceptions, but it's hardly anything Twitch can grow the platform on the back of.

That's true; those streamers tend to be the ones who have made it and have "tenure" now.

so how does esports make any money?

It doesn't. Especially not of late.

Virtually nobody makes money in esport

Money laundering.

Twitch is probably at peak "enshittification." Disastrous business decisions, from both the degradation of the product in the name of profits, as well as the questionable way it has engaged with the growing discontent of streamers and its broader user base.

At one of the orgs I was with in Amazon, and we had some cross-channel comms and processes with them. It was always funny to us how Twitch employees wore their culture as a badge of honor (they never were really a part of Amazon, culturally speaking), but in practice they embodied the ugliest traits of stereotypical Amazon teams: zero trust or charitability from them, and the adversarial/transactional nature of meetings was cranked up to a thousand. They guarded their data and general information from us with a particular zeal out of a confessed mistrust. So you can imagine how ironic and funny it was on our side when their massive leak occurred.

Twitch is an immeasurably worse place to work at now than it was before the pandemic.

The creep of corp Amazon culture accelerated. Twitch was acquired in 2014, but it was still Twitch, and not Amazon, when it came to culture. That's no longer true.

It no longer feels like a special environment. These layoffs really seal the magic being gone, though they would have happened even if Amazon hadn't acquired Twitch.

Many core employees have left in the past few years.

Amazon managers have been transferring in at a steady pace.

A beloved early employee committed suicide.

Twitch's source code was leaked shortly afterwards.

Wait, how many employees does Twitch have (there are no numbers in the linked articles).

According to the LinkedIn company profile, a little over 13 thousand. I don't know how reliable of a number that is.

That’ll be a lot of people who are streamers on twitch with it listed on their LinkedIn profile. I’d ballpark closer to 2,000 actual employees — maybe 1,500 as a conservative estimate.

Glassdoor and Owler both say Twitch has between 1,000 and 5,000 employees. Your ballpark is in the ... errr... ballpark.

so laying off 20%-26% of staff. wowzers.

Recent history has shown us that behind every 10 thousand strong tech team, stands twenty engineers maintaining the entire stack.

edit: downvote all you want, but it is clear that there is so much fluff in a tech company 2023

About 2100

https://blog.twitch.tv/en/2023/03/20/an-update-about-our-wor...

Post directly on the twitch blog.

I left Twitch not so long ago (May 2022), not surprised at all by this.

care to elaborate?

There's lots to elaborate. Tl;dr is toxic siloed teams, bad management, and even worse management above those managers. Plus, since the Amazon acquisition, Twitch has been bleeding talent.

I left Twitch in 2017 and all of these things were true then as well. I worked with quite a few smart people and the perks and comp were great, but damn so much toxic crap going on, and seriously poor management.

I'm glad you got to spend some time with those smart folks... I really craved that while I was there. They had an all star team for quite a while, I got the tail end of it.

Is there any obvious reason for toxicity at Twitch? Is it at all related to the type of work being done and its relationship to video game culture? Or does it stem from some business perspective of the management instead?

Very hard to say. I have suspicions but don't really feel comfortable sharing. News like this is a chip in their armor, expect to see more soon.

Streaming in GENERAL seems to be a very toxic world, especially considering what happens when they realize they're basically all competing for the "same slice of the pie" and I suspect that heavily influences working on the actual platform.

That is understandable, but does it make sense for the product of a company to negatively impact the company itself? Perhaps being forced to deal with their customer base rubs off on them.

Would you mind sharing some non specific examples of toxicity. I’ve been thinking about this of late. Every job has crap but some good parts. I think different orgs have varying kinds/levels of toxicity.

I got hired to do C++ work, JD an all interviews outlined this clearly. Had about a month of C++ work and then was quickly forced to start doing React work. My background and skill set is in embedded C programming.

What a waste. I'm sure you were fine at React but there are plenty of places that can make better use of your skills.

Twitch has made some weird design choices lately, like the paid feature to put a "superchat" below the stream video... (Yes below the video, not in the chat box)

Except that the streamer can't see them because it doesn't show up on the dashboard.

This news comes after the CEO of Twitch announced that he is leaving the company [1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35184011

Twitch is part of Amazon, so likely just part of the bigger round of layoffs.

Why doesn't twitch go after youtube? The market seems large enough.

Also if they could produce tiktok like gaming videos that would probably be popular.

a nuanced understanding if I've ever seen one

My kids consume roblox and minecraft videos ad infinitum and they are all on Google. I pay for premium to avoid ads so if twitch took this market I would pay twitch.

They also make roblox tiktoks as well but the overall workflow/interface is kind of difficult on the ipad. Really roblox should just make that app for themselves. Build it into the ipad app.

If you run product at either of these companies, implement these things and you'll make a mint.

Those terrible mission statements, drop them, please.

amazon in total is laying off 9K people

https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/20/23648348/amazon-layoffs-j...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com