Twitch has announced the layoff of 500 more workers

Twitch is experiencing yet another round of layoffs.

According to reports, the Amazon-owned livestreaming company will announce the layoffs as early as this week, affecting 35% of the workforce, or about 500 people.

When I reached out to Twitch for a comment, the company took some time to react.

The corporation has already lost hundreds of jobs due to leadership changes, increasing operational expenses, and community unrest last year, and this is the latest setback. Almost immediately after Dan Clancy took over as CEO from Twitch co-founder and veteran executive Emmett Shear, the firm laid off 400 workers. Closing its Game Growth group—which was meant to assist game makers in marketing themselves—and its Crown channel—Amazon-run Twitch programming—late last year, Amazon slashed another 180 workers.

One of the world’s biggest esports markets, South Korea, is on the verge of having its Twitch service cut off due to “prohibitively expensive” network costs. The company’s operations in Korea had been running at a “significant loss,” according to Clancy’s blog post announcing the closure, and there was “no path forward” to continue sustainably.

The number of people using Twitch has increased dramatically since the epidemic lockdowns a few years ago, yet the network is still losing money. Its decision to focus on advertising income rather than content has backfired, according to Bloomberg, and the firm is still losing money over 10 years after Amazon bought it. This has been a major gripe with viewers and streamers. The chief revenue officer was one of many high-ranking Twitch employees that departed in December.

Supporting broadcast material on such a massive scale comes with hefty operational expenditures for Twitch. Citing the interactive video rates offered by Amazon Web Services, Clancy claimed in a blog post from 2022 that the monthly cost to Twitch of each high-volume broadcaster is around $1,000.

“Transmitting high-definition, low-latency, continuously available live video to almost every part of the globe is costly,” Clancy said.