The good news is that, combined with the implosion of most esports, there may be room to innovate again. Twitch and game publishers didn't leave a lot of room for startups. If they no longer believe there's a ton of money to be made by taking risks, maybe there's an opportunity for new businesses to try again.
Twitch's focus on live and hostility towards VODs makes it a zero sum game, and their discoverability makes it a "the rich get richer" system. If you look at your revenue as a function of hours streamed per week, YT makes more sense for everyone but the top 1% on Twitch.
Twitch's hostility to VODs greatly contribute to that. You can't ever take a break and let passive income trickle in.
The most popular content now seems to be Just Chatting and react content. These days you can get to see 4 levels of OTK streamers watching and reacting to each others' react videos, sometimes in some kind of circular dependency graph.
Just Chatting is an interesting one, because it's mostly a parking space for streamers who are just engaging with chat. However, that's content that retains a streamer's audience most of the time. That's hardly the content that will draw new people to the platform. You have a few notable exceptions, but it's hardly anything Twitch can grow the platform on the back of.
edit: downvote all you want, but it is clear that there is so much fluff in a tech company 2023
Also if they could produce tiktok like gaming videos that would probably be popular.
They also make roblox tiktoks as well but the overall workflow/interface is kind of difficult on the ipad. Really roblox should just make that app for themselves. Build it into the ipad app.
If you run product at either of these companies, implement these things and you'll make a mint.
At one of the orgs I was with in Amazon, and we had some cross-channel comms and processes with them. It was always funny to us how Twitch employees wore their culture as a badge of honor (they never were really a part of Amazon, culturally speaking), but in practice they embodied the ugliest traits of stereotypical Amazon teams: zero trust or charitability from them, and the adversarial/transactional nature of meetings was cranked up to a thousand. They guarded their data and general information from us with a particular zeal out of a confessed mistrust. So you can imagine how ironic and funny it was on our side when their massive leak occurred.
The creep of corp Amazon culture accelerated. Twitch was acquired in 2014, but it was still Twitch, and not Amazon, when it came to culture. That's no longer true.
It no longer feels like a special environment. These layoffs really seal the magic being gone, though they would have happened even if Amazon hadn't acquired Twitch.
Many core employees have left in the past few years.
Amazon managers have been transferring in at a steady pace.
A beloved early employee committed suicide.
Twitch's source code was leaked shortly afterwards.
Post directly on the twitch blog.
Except that the streamer can't see them because it doesn't show up on the dashboard.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/20/23648348/amazon-layoffs-j...
