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this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2024
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Just popping in here to toot my own horn:
I called this happening when whatever his name is, Twitch CEO man, gave the public speech/stream being very, very appreciative of Amazon for their support.
When you do /that/ it means your business model is a failure.
EDIT
https://sh.itjust.works/post/12652127
(no clue if this is somehow against some rules or some kind of lemmy instance feud, but heres the thread with my original post)
Anyway, Twitch is quite likely to ultimately basically kill itself with this move, and Amazon will either spin the employees off into existing Amazon sub sections, possibly but not likely do some nonsense like keep the twitch brand name but dramatically re orient the site, or, most likely, just slowly lay off more and more twitch employees and formally pull the plug, while retaining the brand rights and web url, all that kinda stuff.
I give it about 2 years before one of those scenarios comes to fruition. Could be faster if insanity twitch drama gets even more insane than normal.
Twitch still has critical mass. YT Streaming is still horrible, Kick is a giant advertisement for Stake and Mixer died years ago.
As long as they can find a way to milk more money out of users they’ll stay around.
I miss Beam/Mixer...
Youre looking at this from the perspective of the consumer, not the business side.
I dont disagree at all that YT streaming is not up to par with Twitch.
But theres no immutable law that says 'there must be an easy to use internet video streaming site.'
I think that Amazon shifting toward Twitch needing to be more soley responsible for its own profitability will reduce its growth in user count, and eventually, as with so, so many other online websites with huge upkeep expenses but very little income stream... this will inevitably lead to death of the service/site.
I could be wrong about the amount the growth slows down by, but yeah I certainly wouldnt expect Twitch to be around, at least not without huge amounts of monetization compared to what there is now, in 5 years.
I miss Beam/Mixer...
I miss Beam/Mixer...
If Amazon is sinking money into it, someone somewhere sees a path to profitability. I can't imagine why they'd invest all that money only to shut down one of the internet's largest brands.
Giant tech firms are actually /notorious/ for investing huge amounts of money into basically experimental/risky ventures, and then pulling the plug.
Google in particular... Stadia, Google Places (or whatever was the name of their attempt at out Facebooking Facebook).
MSFT has done this a bunch... even a lot of non really 'Tech' huge corporations do this as well, with increasing regularity since the Mergers and Acquisitions trend started in the 80s.
The way they are able to do this is that they have core business branches that are able to functionally internally subsidize these risky ideas, with the math on it all only making sense if the risky idea that needs to be subsidized can remain subsidized until it either turns a profit on its own, or is absolutely essential to a syngergistic business plan between other business lines under the same corporate banner.
However... as a large multi faceted business such as this faces as economic downturn?
Generally what happens is all the top management starts getting nervous and wants all of their sort of sub businesses to be more self sufficient.
Now Twitch in particular is basically a burning money pit, a black hole.
Amazon acquired because they assumed it would keep growing rapidly.
But... when you start making the average Twitch user have to pay more money, view more ads, etc, to use the site, this functionally starts a death cycle.
Making Twitch have increased responsibility for its own profitability necessarily slows down the growth. And the growth rate is required for running Twitch to make sense in the long run.
Tl:dr: Yeah, they saw a path to profitability, overall, for all of Amazon, and now that path includes more monetization for Twitch which will necessarily lower the growth number of Twitch, which makes that original overall profitability plan look more like it doesnt include Twitch than including Twitch.