Includes Shuttering of Crown Twitch channel
Sources across the board have reported that Amazon has cut 180 jobs from its gaming division. The cuts in question completely wiped out the Game Growth team, as well as all staff for their Crown Twitch channel. A leaked email claims a pivot to refocusing efforts on growth areas, like providing free games to Prime subscribers.
After our initial restructuring in April, it became clear that we needed to focus our resources even more on the areas that are growing with the highest potential to drive our business forward. We’ve listened to our customers and we know delivering free games every month is what they want most, so we are refining our Prime benefit to increase our focus there.
Amazon Games VP Christoph Hartmann, via internal email reported on by Reuters
If you were not familiar with Amazon’s Crown channel on Twitch (I wasn’t), it provided content with the feel of more traditional television shows, only focused on games. As they’ve cut all staff, that means that all of these shows are abruptly ending. Which is surprising, as the channel had some big name sponsors, such as Intel and Progressive.
That said, it may have all been a facade. Earlier in the year, a report from Bloomberg suggested that views on the channel were being inflated with “junk views”; or, in other words, viewers that served no purpose towards advertisers other than to make the view count look good. Given the low follower counts and engagement through chat, Bloomberg may have been right on the money.
The 180 jobs cut are related to broader restructuring that saw a number of cuts from the company’s streaming and podcast divisions last week. The last time Amazon cut jobs from their gaming division was back in April of this year, putting 100 employees out of work. Overall, Amazon has cut 27,000 jobs across all divisions since last Fall, part of a larger trend of tech-company belt-tightening this year.
As for Crown, the channel remains up for the time being. Though one does have to wonder what will happen to it in the long term.
Source: Engadget
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