After founding CEO Emmett Shear resigned from his post on Twitch, the streaming platform's company has laid off over 400 employees.
Last week, Twitch's founding CEO Emmett Shear stepped down from the company after 16 years. This followed a controversial 2022 – 2023, in which the executive has been criticized for allowing gambling sites to be streamed on the platform, among other things. While Shear claims that he's leaving to spend more time with his family, the controversies that surrounded his last few years in office definitely factored in on his decision as well.
What followed the CEO's exit is a layoff that saw about a fifth or 20% of Twitch's workforce leaving the company for good. New Twitch CEO Dan Clancy blamed the general economic climate in his announcement this Monday, March 20, 2023, saying:
“Like many companies our business has been impacted by the current macroeconomic environment, and user and revenue growth has not kept pace with our expectations. In order to run our business sustainably, we've made the very difficult decision to shrink the size of our workforce.”
This Twitch layoff, paired with the fact that Twitch has been losing its biggest stars to YouTube, spells eventual doom for the platform unless drastic changes are made. Twitch's controversies, its unwillingness to listen to its viewers and its biggest streamers, its questionable bans of some of its creators, and the more lucrative deals offered by its competitors to its stars, led to a sort of exodus of some of Twitch's biggest stars in recent years.
Elsewhere in Amazon, Twitch's parent company, more than nine thousand employees were also laid off on Monday. Amazon has reportedly laid off over 18,000 employees over the course of the past few months. It is unknown whether or not Emmett Shear knew about the upcoming layoffs prior to his resignation from Twitch.
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