Layoffs are hitting Amazon’s entertainment businesses. Twitch, the industry-leading livestreaming platform Amazon acquired in 2014, is cutting more than 500 jobs. In a memo to employees shared on the company’s blog, Twitch CEO Dan Clancy said the company has been cutting costs over the last year — including a separate round of layoffs in March — but “it has become clear that our organization is still meaningfully larger than it needs to be given the size of our business.” “As with many other companies in the tech space, we are now sizing our organization based upon the current scale ..read more

(GeekWire File Photo) Twitch announced on Monday that it would lay off “just over 400 people,” part of a new round of layoffs at its parent company Amazon. “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,” Twitch CEO Dan Clancy wrote on the Twitch blog. “In order to run our business sustainably, we’ve made the very difficult decision to shrink the size of our workforce.” Clancy has been CEO at Twitch for all of four days, following previous CEO Emmett Shear’s resignation on March ..read more

Kenley Cheung, director of production & education at Seattle Online Broadcasters’ Association, addresses a crowd of streamers at SOBA’s first in-person meetup since 2020. (GeekWire Photo / Thomas Wilde) As live events start coming back after a pandemic-induced hiatus, one of the major organizations in Seattle’s local livestreaming scene has taken the opportunity to reorganize its events and community. The Seattle Online Broadcasters’ Association (SOBA) is a group that’s dedicated to providing local livestreamers and content creators with “a resource for collaboration, education, and mutual ..read more

(Amazon Image) Amazon Games announced that its cloud-based game streaming platform Luna is officially out of beta, and is now available to any interested user in the mainland U.S. Initially announced in September 2020, Luna is a subscription service that lets users sign up for one or several themed “channels,” where they can play a built-in lineup of video games via web browser, Fire TV or tablets, or a variety of supported mobile devices. These games are streamed to the user’s device via Amazon Web Services, without any need for local installations or updates. You can go from the Luna menu to ..read more

(Xbox Image) Microsoft’s Xbox department announced on Wednesday that Xbox users can once again stream their gameplay directly from their consoles to Twitch. This is the first time in years that Twitch has been available on the Xbox, and the first time since the closure of Microsoft’s Mixer platform that Xbox users have had any direct livestreaming options at all. If you’ve seen any recent broadcasts on Twitch or elsewhere that were on Xbox hardware, it was likely done through an indirect third-party gadget like an Elgato Stream Deck. The new Twitch integration is available on the Xbox One and ..read more

Gamers try out the latest games and gaming rigs at PAX. It’s been a strange year in a strange business. The video game industry came into 2021 with a lot of momentum, with millions of new customers, high sales, and venture capitalists falling over each other to put more money into the system. It couldn’t last forever, though. Video games were the only form of mass-media entertainment that didn’t seem to be affected by the lockdown measures in early 2020, but that was primarily due to how the industry’s release calendar works. The disruptions from quarantine only started to show in early 2021 ..read more

New World. (Amazon Game Studios Photo) Twitch’s audience numbers have begun to tick back up now that summer’s over; “virtual YouTubers” are pulling in surprisingly big numbers; and Amazon’s MMORPG New World, in its first full month on Twitch, debuted at No. 5 on the overall top 10 for total hours watched. These are some of the big takeaways from the latest “State of the Stream” report, released on Monday morning by the Israeli influencer-marketing form StreamElements and its Chicago-based analytics partner, Rainmaker.gg. The State of the Stream monthly analysis tracks viewership numbers and co ..read more

(Bigstock Photo). If you were using the web version of Twitch early Friday morning, you might’ve gotten the chance to see it get redecorated with a picture of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ face. For several hours, an extreme close-up of Bezos’ eyes became the new background image for many if not all of the video game-related category pages on Twitch, a livestreaming-focused subsidiary of Amazon. The change has since been reverted. Twitch has yet to offer any comment on the subject, and at time of writing, no has taken responsibility for the incident. More Twitch shenanigans are afoot. All game d ..read more

The Amazon-owned livestreaming network Twitch has confirmed that it’s been hacked, in what one BBC analyst called “the biggest leak I have ever seen.” Early Wednesday, an anonymous poster on the infamous 4chan message board put up a torrent that contains 125GB of what purports to be internal data from Twitch, reportedly to “foster more disruption and competition in the online video streaming space.” At least some of the supposed Twitch data has been confirmed as legitimate, such as information about the payments received by several of Twitch’s top streamers. Video Game Chronicle, which was th ..read more

Participants in Sept. 1’s work stoppage were encouraged to retweet and spread this image, showing the goal of the event. (ADayOffTwitch Image) Sept. 1 saw a day-long strike by some of the most popular streamers on Twitch, and according to numbers released on Thursday morning, it took a deep cut out of the network’s content for the day. The strike, organized with the hashtag #ADayOffTwitch, asked participants to stay off of Twitch entirely for a full 24 hours, in an attempt to motivate the Amazon-owned network’s management to take more proactive action against abusive actors on the platform. As ..read more