Just a day after Unity announced it would be laying off 1,800 employees as part of an ongoing “company reset”, it’s bei…

  • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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    10 months ago

    Probably. I only watch one streamer, and only occasionally.

    That said, headcount shouldn’t need to scale much with more users. Look at Valve, which has ~360 employees and hit 33.5M active users, ~11M playing a game. Here’s some of what Valve does:

    • hardware products, like Steam Deck and Valve Index
    • Windows compat - Proton; granted, most of the people working on this aren’t Valve employees, but contractors Valve pays
    • make games - not often, but there’s still maintenance work
    • manage a CDN - not quite as much data as Twitch, but still substantial, and it’s certainly in the realm of not being a huge difference in terms of manpower to maintain
    • Steam Link app - available on many of the platforms you listed
    • Steam mobile app
    • Steam app - Linux, Windows, macOS

    So Valve has a similar-ish level of complexity with well under 500 employees. Maybe Twitch needs another 100 or so employees to manage the CDN, but surely not another 1500 or more.