Amazon is laying off employees in its long-troubled gaming division.
According to Reuters, some 180 jobs were cut. “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,” Hartmann, vice president of Amazon Games, wrote in an email viewed by the news service. In April, the division cut around 100 workers.
Like other tech giants, Amazon unleashed sweeping layoffs earlier this year, starting with 18,000 eliminated positions in January, followed by more strategic cuts in subsequent months. It recently trimmed headcount in its HR, podcast, and streaming music units.
Several years ago, Amazon seemed ready to compete not only with other gaming studios, but also Unity and Unreal, the dominant game-development platforms. In 2016, it unveiled Amazon Lumberyard, which paired rich game-development tooling with the cloud storage and compute of Amazon Web Services (AWS). Whatever its virtues, Lumberyard failed to make much of a dent against either Unity or Unreal, and Amazon eventually transitioned game developers onto a different open-source platform.
Amazon Games (formerly Amazon Game Studios), which was meant to unleash a series of blockbuster games, faced a messy production schedule and rounds of layoffs. However, Amazon still has sizable influence on the gaming ecosystem thanks to its ownership of Twitch, which allows users to live-stream their video-game playing to a potential audience of millions.
Amazon isn’t the only video-game maker laying off employees, either. Earlier this month, Bungie, the famed video-game maker of “Halo” and “Destiny,” laid off an unspecified number of staff. Epic Games, Telltale Games, BioWare, Embracer Group, and other studios have likewise cut positions. Although the video-game industry remains a dominant force in popular culture, it seems like many companies are currently trimming back their ranks and expenses.
Never fear, though; if you’re a video game developer (or aspire to become one), the video game industry is only slated to grow in years ahead, opening up new opportunities… provided you have the right mix of skills.
