Amazon is laying off even more workers, less than two weeks before the start of the holiday season. CNBC reports that the company has confirmed it is laying off over 180 team members in its gaming division.
In an internal memo, Christoph Hartmann, vice president of Amazon Games, announced that as part of the changes to the division, it will be closing two teams. One is Game Growth, which Amazon previously announced as "re-imagining how game creators promote their products across the globe".
The other team that is shutting down in the division is Crown Channel. It was one of Amazon's own Twitch channels that was supposed to help promote games with special programming. However, a Bloomberg story from earlier this year claimed that the channel's viewership numbers were artificially boosted by people who were not actively viewing its content.
Hartmann stated in his memo that Amazon Games will concentrate on its upcoming publishing efforts, including two free-to-play games: Throne and Liberty, and Blue Protocol. It's also planning to publish the next Tomb Raider game from Crystal Dynamics, and it's also making a new MMO based on The Lord of the Rings.
Last week, Reuters reported that Amazon had also laid off a number of employees in its Amazon Music division. A company spokesperson confirmed, "Some roles have been eliminated on the Amazon Music team." However, there's no word on how many team members were affected.
In January 2023, Amazon announced it would lay off 18,000 of its employees. The move mainly affected members in its Amazon Stores and People Experience and Technology (PXT) Solutions teams. Just a couple of months later, in March 2023, Amazon announced yet another 9,000 of its team members would be cut. Those layoffs mostly affected employees in its AWS, PXT, Advertising, and Twitch divisions.
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