Amazon's Twitch To Cut 500 Employees, About 35% of Staff - Slashdot
source link: https://slashdot.org/story/24/01/09/2338230/amazons-twitch-to-cut-500-employees-about-35-of-staff
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Amazon's Twitch To Cut 500 Employees, About 35% of Staff
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by NobleNobbler ( 9626406 ) on Tuesday January 09, 2024 @08:58PM (#64145731)
Does anyone else think that the state of tech is a lot worse than is let on, or what
Does anyone else think that the state of tech is a lot worse than is let on, or what
As an industry-insider, I am surprised this hasn't happened sooner. We've had like 2 decades of record-low interest rates and people throwing money into anything resembling a business plan. Maybe I am showing my age, but I am skeptical there is BROAD appeal for watching other people play video games. There's clearly an audience for it, but I just don't get it. For most of us, we only watched someone else play a game when we were waiting for our turn. So let's say this is an amazing great time for those under 30...and torture for everyone older...well...not a GREAT business plan. Decent?....sure...but more of a niche audience.
Let's not forget the majority of the population doesn't play video games. That's simply a fact. There are more people alive who don't actively play video games at all than who do. For many on slashdot, you may not know anyone like this, but I have a lot of female friends...most don't play video games. Some?...yeah...but some percentage greater than 51 do not.
OK, so you have mostly young men with so much free time they want to watch others play video games rather than hang out with actual friends or play the video games themselves? How much monetization potential is there?
As you get promotions and more pay, you tend to have less time, not more...more interest from the opposite sex and dating is not conducive to watching twitch streams, to my knowledge....then you get married and have kids...definitely less time for that kind of stuff. So...the folks most likely to buy lots of stuff don't have time to watch your service?...seems like a headwind to me.
Every old person can name dozens of dot coms and web 2.0 companies with business models that didn't make sense and they ultimately perished. Now that borrowing money is not so cheap, people want your business to turn a profit, so companies with niche business models have to become profitable or perish.
Honestly, this is not a bad thing. Many companies with great business models are starved for resources: talent, capital, attention, customers, etc. Kosmo and Webvan ultimately become Instacart and Uber eats. Pets.com becomes Chewey. AltaVista, Excite, and Ask Jeeves become Google. Several bad companies fail and the good companies get stronger.
We've had many years of unsustainable expansion among the top tech companies. Now that they're correcting and focusing on profitability instead of trying to run a frathouse for nerds...instead of being the coolest campus on the valley...focusing on running a business...their correction means their competition can get top talent. Top engineers can go to second-tier companies with actual customers and a business model, but far less sex appeal. Banks, insurance companies, sellers other than Amazon.com, finance companies, and manufacturers can hire tech talent. Yeah, the number of jobs with free laundry service, dog-walking, and beer on tap throughout the day is declining, but we still have plenty of well-paying tech jobs.
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Woah, woah, woah, that seems to me to be really overreaching. I just saw a measured yet personal analysis of the state of things-- he wasn't advocating anything amoral.
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No you just saw measurement. You didn't see any form of logical analysis. You can substitute gaming in his main point for literally any other hobby or activity and still come to the same conclusion because of the simply premise that you need a majority of the population to do something for it to become a viable market. That is of course utter nonsense. Gaming is a $230billion industry that has existed now for 40 years. It clearly has monetisation potential despite the "analysis" presented here.
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230 billion industry mostly built on two pillars: Men playing competitive games, and women playing casual games.
There's not going to be a lot of women watching a connect 3 stream, and not a lot of men watching a CoD streamer. Maybe 1-2% of total player base for latter, and more like 0.002% for former (just look at sex distribution on platforms like twitch and youtube that do gaming streams). So monetization for games is a completely different industry from monetizing streams.
Conflating the two is how we got
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1-2% of total player base is still potentially a lot of people.
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It is. Potentially.
You know what else is potentially a great number of people? People who walk the streets during the day. And they have more time to watch streams that people who like to play games, as people who like to play games in their free time... don't have that much free time to watch streams. Unlike people who walk the streets with their phones out.
"Potentially" in this case is a weasel word that renders anything it refers to moot.
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It's literally been YEARS since I actually logged in to reply to a post on/., but I had to respond to this one. I haven't laughed at a/. post as much as laughed at this one, EVER.
Dude, if someone showed me the OP, and your response, then asked me to identify the Sociopath/Psychopath, YOUR response would--without any hesitance--have been my choice.
Troll, or not, F'ing hilarious.
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Think of it like a basketball player watching videos of dribbling drills or highlights of their favourite player..
How do you get better? Watch/study better players.
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What is an industry insider? Aren't we all industry insiders here on Slashdot?
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I've replaced most of my TV watching with GTA RP on Twitch.
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All the evidence suggests that people like sports and will pay to watch them. eSports is no different in that regard. What is different is the demographic skewing younger, and therefore with less disposable income.
It may just be a case of waiting for them to earn more, or gen Z might be screwed by the economy/climate change/housing costs and never pay as much for entertainment as previous generations.
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1.8 billion hours in average per month, that's on the order of magnitude of 10 hours twitch a month per user. That's fucking broad in my view. And the "most people don't play game" was maybe true back in 2000 or 2010, but nowadays gamer back from 1990 or 2000 are now getting older (for reference I am 50+).
"According to a survey conducted in October 2022, 70 percent of adults in the United States played video games on at least one platform. In comparison, 30 percent of U.S. adults did not play video games at
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You just described everything. Like... literally every hobby, every sport, every indoor / outdoor activity aside from eating and shitting.
You fail to realise that even small markets have large monetisation potential. Most people don't game, you are correct. It is *ONLY* a $230billion dollar industry. No money to see there simply because only a minority of the population do it right?
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> Maybe I am showing my age, but I am skeptical there is BROAD appeal for watching other people play video games. There's clearly an audience for it, but I just don't get it.
Not to undermine your broader point, but:
NFL revenues ~$20B/yr
NBA revenues ~$12B/yr
MLB revenues ~$14B/yr
NHL revenues ~$6B/yrThere is absolutely an audience for watching other people play games, video or otherwise. The only problem unique to videogame streaming is the barrier to entry is so low the market is beyond saturated. I suppos
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Games with relatively constant and easily understood basic rules that aren't owned by anyone and can be played by anyone, where people constantly demonstrate physical excellence in an easily discernible ways, yes.
Video games fail all of these criteria. In fact, the closer video games manage to get to these criteria, the more popular they tend to be in the "waching people play" world. Current undisputed king of being watched as a video game, LoL has a relatively constant ruleset, is fairly easily understood
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Exactly.
I am old enough to have observed the gradual transformation of sporting activities into extremely predatory commercial monopolies with total media complicity. This is completely abnormal and it’s crazy how many people still don’t understand the extent of the problem, even with so many scandals and abuse stories.
Of course, there is a curiosity to see the best in their respective fields, but people more like to participate and progress by sharing and spending time with others with respect.
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Money and sex seem to be the only things that motivate you.
I'm 53, a father of two adult sons, and I LOVE how people hangout remotely on Twitch. There are a lot of amazing people sharing a part of their lives live, their skills, their art, their travels, their discussions, etc... Twitch and Discord use the same model of moderators and all benefit two from much more respectful communities than on other major 'social' (but actually toxic) network.
We live in a society of social apocalypse incapable of renewing
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You could say the same about people who like to watch live streams of sportsball matches, but that is a very profitable business; at least for everyone except the actual owners of the sportsball teams.
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