Twitch, the leading video game broadcaster in the world — and probably your number one spot for watching fighting game streams — has been in a weird spot lately. At least according to Glassdoor, a site where employees of the company can anonymously rate it and say what they think of management. Recently, the page has been rife with negative reviews, usually about a lack of direction. The overall rating has gone down from about 4.5 stars during mid-2016 to a current 2.8.
A reddit user compiled most of the posts; many of the Glassdoor reviews praise work perks such as unlimited paid time-off, free food, etc., but also state things like “Leadership is a mess,”; “Terrible senior management is what will kill this company,”; “Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here,” describing lack of opportunities for growth. One review talks about the effects of the company’s acquisition by Amazon:
Half the company reports to CEO and the other half the company to the honorary CEO from Amazon. Halves pretend to work together but run more as silos than what not. Amazon is taking charge and shows as top level management scrambling to meet goals or numbers. “Top” priorities change all the time, people now get screamed at because of bugs, post mortem left and right.
Curiously enough, one review claims that Human Resource employees of the company are writing five-star reviews to “keep the Glassdoor rating afloat,” but that claim isn’t substantiated.
While negative Glassdoor reviews should be taken with a grain of salt (just like Yelp restaurant reviews, remember that people are much more likely to write about negative experiences than positive ones), they do suggest an overall trend in the company’s “growth pains,” and it’s reasonable to guess that Twitch gained some corporate baggage since the Amazon buyout in 2014.
Is Twitch doing as badly as the Glassdoor reviews suggest, though? Analysis from the Motley Fool, a multimedia financial services company, says otherwise. A recent article from the site pits Twitch as a leader in the streaming market, dominating both video game watching as well as services like Netlfix and HBO. Latest reports show Twitch’s 737,000 concurrent viewers is still more than double of YouTube Gaming. The number of active streamers on Twitch grew by 54% in Q2 of 2017, and a smaller gain of 16% in Q3 of this year.
Source: reddit; Glassdoor; Motley Fool