Amazon announces another round of job cuts, lays off 180 employees from gaming division

Amazon is laying off approximately 180 employees from its gaming division in the latest round of job cuts. This marks the second wave of layoffs within a week by the e-commerce giant as part of its broader restructuring. In an internal memo shared with employees, Amazon cited that the job cuts are a strategic move to further concentrate on restructuring efforts to focus on areas with the highest potential for growth.

In the official email sent to staffers on Monday and viewed by Reuters, Christoph Hartmann, Vice President of Amazon Games, said, "After our initial restructuring in April, it became clear that we needed to further concentrate our resources on the areas that are experiencing the highest potential for driving our business forward.""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."

Amazon started the employee layoffs on Monday, informing affected individuals that their positions had been eliminated. The latest round of layoffs also marked the second round of divisional layoffs this year in the company. According to reports, Amazon had earlier started reducing staff in its streaming music and podcast division last week, as well as cutting a small number of jobs in the human resources unit known as People Experience and Technology (PXT).

As for the Amazon Gaming department, the division is dedicated to providing downloadable games, Twitch channels, and other services on a monthly basis. It focuses on the development and publication of games such as 'Blue Protocol' and offers complimentary games to Prime members. Prime Gaming is a perk included in the $139 annual Prime membership, which encompasses free shipping and streaming video services.

The latest layoffs are also the second round of layoffs in the Games Division, as the company previously laid off about 100 jobs in the games unit.

Meanwhile, Amazon has cut more than 27,000 jobs over the past year, following a wave of U.S. tech layoffs after the industry overtired during the pandemic. However, despite these cuts, Amazon's third-quarter net income far exceeded analyst expectations, and the company forecast revenue in the final quarter of the year to be roughly in line with expectations.

However, despite the job cuts, Amazon is also hiring new employees. Hartmann said in his email that the company is still hiring for other roles in the division. He acknowledged that this is the second time this year that employees have heard about organizational changes and seen colleagues leave, but he said that he remains confident in the future.

Meanwhile, Amazon is also making a big bet on language models, investing heavily in Olympus, a new model with 2 trillion parameters that aims to rival the best from OpenAI and Alphabet. If successful, Olympus could help Amazon generate billions of dollars in revenue, according to CEO Andy Jassy. But Amazon already sells language models from itself and others, such as Anthropic.