Unity, Amazon and Discord are off to a very bad start to 2024 by laying off thousands of people. The disaster continues, after a particularly painful year 2023 in our sector.
2023 has really hurt the industry. If we have had a lot of exits and announcements, there has also been an astronomical amount of layoffs. Nearly 9,000 jobs have been lost in the video games industry and its surroundings, and unfortunately it’s not over. From the start of 2024, several large companies like Unity, Amazon and Discord have further cut jobs. It hurts very, very badly.
Major layoffs at Amazon and Twitch
Twitch, the streaming giant favored by thousands of spectators, including many gamers, who follow their favorite streamer and gamer, has also reduced its workforce. 500 people were made redundant, almost 35% of the remaining workforce in total. Last year, the company cut nearly 700 jobs. The reason ? Twitch is absolutely unprofitable. This has been going on for years and it hurts. Maintaining services, which are free, remember, has a cost. A bill that the platform is struggling to cover even by taking part of the revenue from subscriptions (subs) and integrating ads everywhere. Streaming exploded during the pandemic, and many streamers made themselves known at that time.
Twitch was able to breathe a little, but it’s now over, and the return to reality hurts. Here again, the platform will have to quickly find a solution to avoid going into the wall, especially since the firm now has a strong competitor: Kick, a much more lax platform in terms of regulations and which is financed by a colossus of the online casino. Twitch is not the only branch of Amazon to be affected by these layoffs since around a hundred positions will also be eliminated at Prime Video and MGM Studios, recently purchased.
Unity in turmoil while Discord scales back everything
Unity, a development company to which we owe the eponymous graphics engine, one of the most widely used in the industry, has again laid off thousands of employees. This is the fifth wave of layoffs, the fifth time that the firm is cleaning up to “refocus your activities”. This time, Unity is letting go of 1,800 employees, or a quarter of its workforce. It’s colossal. After trying to make developers pay to replenish the coffers, and finally backing down following the controversy, the company began to thank its employees profusely. It’s hard to know where this will all end, but it doesn’t bode well.
Finally, another company to do some major cleaning at the start of the year, Discord announces that it is separating itself from nearly 17% of its workforce, or 170 people. Discord is once again a free application, increasingly in demand and which has also exploded significantly during the Covid19 pandemic. The company then had to increase its workforce by 5 to meet demand. The problem is that the blow is over and now we have to deal with the new reality.
2024 is therefore starting off rather badly from this point of view, with nearly 2,500 positions eliminated. Hoping things improve over the course of the year. But between inflation which affects all sectors and the very tense market context, it is difficult to imagine that this will really be the case. Not to mention the rather unstable consumption habits and trends.