Twitch belongs to Amazon and offers a portal for live streaming. In the gaming community, in particular, the platform is popular and has already spawned a number of stars. Internally, however, there are said to be many disputes about the future of the service. This has led to the departure of many high-ranking managers in recent months.
According to Bloomberg, at least six of the platform’s top executives have resigned since the beginning of the year – including those who held the positions of chief operating officer, chief content officer and head of creator development. The exodus began at the end of 2021 when more than 300 employees said goodbye. This year around 60 employees are said to have looked elsewhere.
Problem: New employees who e.g. B. switched from Meta or Twitter to Twitch should primarily look for ways to monetize streams. The “old guard” placed more emphasis on understanding streamer needs and being directly connected to the community.
The former head of creator development Marcus “DJ Wheat Graham” complained that Twitch hired too many people who liked to mess around with numbers and stats but had no connection to the gaming or streaming community. There is also a lack of interest in dealing with it.
This has led to much-criticized decisions, such as the new option where viewers can advertise their favorite channels for a fee – I also took a critical look at the function at the time of presentation. Internally, there is said to have long been a kind of gap at Twitch between “old” employees, who are more close to the streamers, and the “new” colleagues, who want to apply principles that they know from their former employers like Meta.
As a result, new features for Twitch are now being developed by people who do not actively use Twitch themselves. This leads to development bypassing the community.
There is also debate about whether streamers should be viewed more as users or as creators. Accordingly, it would be possible that Twitch could then particularly promote certain genres in order to expand its target group – for example musicians.
At the moment, however, Twitch does not like such models and in principle only wants to reward the streamers for the largest possible amount of content. It will be interesting to see where the path will lead.