180 staff members have been let go from Amazon Games workforce, and sources close said the decision affected staff from the Crown Channel, as well as game growth employees.
This is at least the second round of layoffs in under a week, as part of a “broader restructuring.”
Amazon has confirmed the news as the entirety of the Amazon-backed Twitch channel, Crown Channel was laid off.
In an internal email, VP Christoph Hartmann said, “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. With these changes in our business approach come changes to our resourcing, resulting in the elimination of just over 180 roles.”
“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.”
Amazon has also cut jobs in the streaming music and podcast division, as well as human resources. Back in April, 100 jobs were cut in the games division, and over the last year, the company has cut over 27,000 roles.
The news of this latest round comes following a wave of video game layoffs this year.
In the last week, Unity announced job cuts despite an increase in revenue, Digital Extremes confirmed 30 staff were laid off, and Ubisoft saw 124 redundancies across the VFX and IT teams.
