Amazon lays off 500 people at Twitch, <> at Prime and MGM

The American giant Amazon is preparing to lay off hundreds of people again. In 2023, 27,000 employees had already had to leave the company in a wave of layoffs that affected the entire new technology sector. This time, the layoffs are focused on Amazon's media departments.

Amazon has announced the elimination of several hundred positions in its Prime Video division. AP - David Zalubowski

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The job cuts affect three entities of the Amazon group

  • Prime Video, the direct competitor streaming service to Netflix and Disney+
  • The legendary MGM film studios behind the films Gone with the Wind, 2001 - A Space Odyssey or the James Bond license bought last year for 8 and a half billion dollars
  • The Twitch streaming platform

The revenues are not commensurate with the sums committed. The first season of The Rings of Power, a series set in the Lord of the Rings universe that aired on Prime, cost nearly half a billion dollars. To plug the holes in the budget, Prime is preparing to run advertising in the middle of its programs.

But it is the very popular streaming platform Twitch that will suffer the most with 500 job cuts, a third of the workforce. "Last year, we paid $1 billion back to streamers," the CEO said in a blog post. "We're too big for the actual size of our market today." Amazon had bought Twitch in 2014 for about $842 million. Since then, the online gaming platform has struggled mightily. It even announced that it would cease its activity in South Korea, where it had established a strong presence among gamers, from February onwards, due to high internet network costs.

The Amazon group had recruited at a rapid pace during the Covid-19 pandemic to meet the explosion in demand, doubling its global workforce between the beginning of 2020 and the beginning of 2022. But last year, the industry began to falter and several tech companies began laying off heavy workers.

(With AFP)

Related: In California, the tech sector is laying off heavy layoffs. Crisis in sight?

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