Twitch, the livestreaming giant, will reduce its workforce by 35%, or about 500 workers. This comes after the company left the South Korean market a few weeks ago.
The cuts are part of a plan to consolidate mounting losses, Bloomberg reports. While the Amazon-owned live-streaming platform is among the most popular in the world, supporting billions of hours of live video pushes up the operating costs.
It’s Twitch’s second major round of layoffs after the company axed 400 employees last year. However, it’s estimated that Twitch’s parent company, Amazon, parted ways with 27,000 employees, a record-high for any company.
In early December 2023, Twitch announced that the company would leave South Korea, a major e-sports destination where the Twitch platform was massively popular.
“While we have lowered costs from these efforts, our network fees in Korea are still ten times more expensive than in most other countries. Twitch has been operating in Korea at a significant loss, and unfortunately, there is no pathway forward for our business to run more sustainably in that country,” Twitch’s CEO, Dan Clancy, said at the time.
The new year began with a round of layoffs in the tech world, with videogame software provider Unity Software announcing that it would fire 25% of its workforce, around 1,800 people.
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