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.
> 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.
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.
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.
[+] [-] madrox|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] activitypea|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] moogly|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] anon115|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jerglingu|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] saddd|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jstummbillig|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mishftw|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ny2ko|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eigen-vector|3 years ago|reply
Post directly on the twitch blog.
[+] [-] _jdzr|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] activitypea|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nubinetwork|3 years ago|reply
Except that the streamer can't see them because it doesn't show up on the dashboard.
[+] [-] avrionov|3 years ago|reply
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35184011
[+] [-] jdlyga|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] theGnuMe|3 years ago|reply
Also if they could produce tiktok like gaming videos that would probably be popular.
[+] [-] activitypea|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Redsquare|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sposeray|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ryder9|3 years ago|reply
https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/20/23648348/amazon-layoffs-j...