Amazon Lays off Just Over 180 Employees in Its Gaming Division

• Amazon is laying off over 180 employees in its gaming division. This is the second round of layoffs in this division this year.
• The move seems part of Amazon’s restructuring and refocusing its efforts on Prime Gaming.

Ecommerce giant Amazon is laying off employees again this year. Earlier in January, the company announced that it was laying off 18,000 employees (from its previous 10,000 in November 2022). This time, Amazon is laying off about 180 employees in its gaming division, Amazon Games. This is also the second time it is laying off employees in this division this year. In April, the company laid off around 100 employeesOpens a new window in this division as part of its broader cutbacks and layoffs.

The company informed its employees about the fresh job cuts on Monday through a memo by Christoph Hartmann, vice president of Amazon Games. According to the memo, the company is shutting down two gaming initiatives: Game Growth and Crown channel. The Game Growth group helped creators in the gaming world market themselves. Crown is a flashy Amazon-run Twitch channel featuring television-like programming. Incidentally, in February this year, Bloomberg reported that the Crown channel was artificially inflatingOpens a new window viewer numbers using junk views.

See more: Meta To Lay off Employees From Its Reality Labs’ Silicon Unit

The move seems to be part of Amazon’s restructuring and refocusing its efforts on Prime Gaming. Prime Gaming is a perk offered by the company as part of its annual membership of $139, providing free games each month to the members.

The memo read, “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. As such, the leadership team and I have made the difficult decision to close two of our initiatives – Crown Channel and Game Growth. We are also refocusing our efforts for Prime Gaming. We’ve listened to our customers and we know delivering free games every month is what they want most, so we are refining our Prime benefit to increase our focus there. With these changes in our business approach come changes to our resourcing, resulting in the elimination of just over 180 roles.”

That said, Hartmann also noted that the company is still hiring for other roles in the division. You can read the full memo Amazon shared with The Verge hereOpens a new window .

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