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CEO Dan Clancy told employees in an email that Twitch is resizing based on the ‘current scale of our business’.
Dan Clancy, chief executive of video game livestreaming platform Twitch, wrote in an email to employees that the Amazon-owned company is cutting more than 500 jobs to “rightsize” the business and run it more sustainably.
“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,” he wrote.
“Unfortunately, despite these efforts, it has become clear that our organisation is still meaningfully larger than it needs to be, given the size of our business.”
Clancy said that Twitch paid out more than $1bn to streamers last year.
“While the Twitch business remains strong, for some time now the organisation has been sized based upon where we optimistically expect our business to be in three or more years, not where we’re at today,” he went on.
“As with many other companies in the tech space, we are now sizing our organisation based upon the current scale of our business and conservative predictions of how we expect to grow in the future.”
The confirmation comes as news of the Twitch layoffs was first leaked by Bloomberg on Tuesday. Clancy wrote in the email that he was sorry for all the “anxiety that it caused over the last several hours” and said he had hoped employees would hear directly from him yesterday (10 January).
“Our hope was that you all would hear from us this morning and very quickly understand how this impacted your role and we were unfortunately not able to accelerate the timeline, which I know is very frustrating,” he wrote.
This is the second time in less than a year that Twitch has announced layoffs. In March last year, the livestreaming service cut hundreds of roles as part of larger layoffs at parent company Amazon that saw 9,000 people lose their jobs. Amazon had already cut 18,000 jobs that January.
“Please know that Twitch remains focused on serving our streamers and ensuring that this is the best place to livestream for many years to come,” Clancy added.
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