Yesterday, PlayStation Studio’s owned Bungie announced via a blog post called “The New Path for Bungie” from Pete Parsons, that they would be gutting 220 people’s jobs today across various divisions of the company. It was also announced that they would be shifting 155 people into roles across Sony Interactive Entertainment, with a good amount of those people leaving to form a new studio to work on a new sci-fi action game.
“First, we are deepening our integration with Sony Interactive Entertainment, working to integrate 155 of our roles, roughly 12%, into SIE over the next few quarters. SIE has worked tirelessly with us to identify roles for as many of our people as possible, enabling us together to save a great deal of talent that would otherwise have been affected by the reduction in force.” – Pete Parson, Bungie
While there is a significant shock to this news, with a lot of fans upset, and many of the people let go have caused an uproar online, this is unfortunately, not the first time this has happened. In fact, last year in November, Bungie gutted a significant amount of people’s jobs following the poor reception of Lightfall. This means that within the span of nearly 10 months, Bungie has gutted or displaced about 33% of their entire development team.
Failure and Success Does Not Matter
Paying attention to the last couple of years, so many people have lost their jobs, even when companies are in the green and breaking records left and right. In fact, this year, Microsoft Gaming also known as Xbox, gutted 1900 people’s jobs following the acquisition of Activision Blizzard King. Then in the following financial report in April, announced that their revenue went up 62% year over year. The reason I’m bringing this up is because last year, the previous annual expansion for Destiny 2, Lightfall, missed its projected revenue by nearly half, and that costed people’s jobs last year. But when it came to The Final Shape the latest annual expansion, it did end up exceeding player counts and sales of Lightfall. However, despite the expansion only launching last month, it still caused a higher number of layoffs.
This has created a lot of bafflement, seeing as Lightfall was received worse, and made less money, but did not cause layoffs until nearly the end of last year. Leading many, me included, to wonder if it matters whether or not if the remaining development staff at Bungie should even care about the quality of what they make moving forward, especially if they could wake up after something selling well or poorly and lose their job all the same. Paul Tassi from Forbes on X said it best:
“Like if you deliver an unequivocally fantastic expansion that delivers on every front and this is your reward, what is even the point of trying at all” – Paul Tassi
While this is a general overview of the situation, there is one last part to all of this that is very important and depressing to point out.
A Horrid Example of Hubris and Greed
Back in January of this year, Airship Syndicate, developers of many titles like Battle Chasers, Ruined King: A League of Legends Story and Darksiders Genesis and recently Wayfinder was hit with layoffs. While the number in comparison was miniscule, 12 compared to 220, the story behind the layoffs is rife with gloom. In November of last year, similar to Bungie, Digital Extremes, who partnered with Airship Syndicate on Wayfinder dissolved their publishing arm. Resulting in layoffs and leaving Airship Syndicate to fend for themselves with Wayfinder that was reaching the high double digits of player numbers on SteamDB at the time.
Airship Syndicates leadership took a pay cut to ensure that more people could stay on, with the situation they were in being caused by forces outside of their control. In comparison to this, and I am unaware if other executives at Bungie are doing similar things. But Ethan Gach from Kotaku has reported that Pete Parsons, the CEO of Bungie spent a whopping $2.4 million USD on classic cars over the last few years while many people at the company were let go. Some of which lashed out over the fact he even invited staff to look at some of the vehicles, weirdly enough. It puts into perspective just how different independent and owned companies operate and treat the people who make them successful to begin with.
Wayfinder has recently undergone a massive overhaul to every single system, right down to its business model while the company has endured so much within 10 months’ time and took pay cuts to keep people employed in the current economic climate. While Destiny 2 has kept the same four layered over-monetized approach to a “Free-to-Play” model since it split from Activision in 2019, and the CEO blows the money he makes on vehicles for show. It’s depressing, to say the least.
What Happens Now?
According to that same “New Path for Bungie” blog post mentioned that they will be continuing to support Destiny 2, as well as get around to finally launching the long-awaited Marathon. While a good chunk of the people who remain split off to develop a new sci-fi action game as a separate studio. But I cannot imagine what it is like for every single developer at Bungie right now knowing that they were able to finish the 10-year journey of Destiny 2 and could eventually be cut after the next annual expansion drops for it, and potentially after the launch of Marathon.
Everyone deserves to feel safe, and fulfilled, and I doubt the leadership in charge are even concerned in ensuring anyone but themselves feel that way. Stay “classy”, Bungie.
Update:
More news keeps pouring out from various sources and outlets. Stephen Totilo from Game File reported the following:
That Bungie oversold the studio to Sony in the acquisition, which would explain the high price of 3.6 billion dollars.
The layoffs were already planned prior to The Final Shape, which means the developers did not know when working on the expansion if they would have their job after launch.
That The Final Shape sold less than Lightfall, which means underperformance of the expansion led to these layoffs.
It was also reported via The Game Post that Luke Smith, the Executive Creative Director at Bungie, and Mark Noseworthy, the Vice President of the Destiny Universe and Bungie left Bungie of their own accord, according to Jeff Grubb of Giant Bomb.
We will continue to update this article as more information comes out.
