Bungie has announced that it will suffer further job losses today in a blog post by Bungie CEO Pete Parsons. According to the article, Bungie will shed 220 of their roles, equating to roughly 17% of the studio’s workforce. This follows the round of layoffs on October 30th 2023 which saw over a hundred members of staff lose their jobs.
The primary reasoning for these cuts is apparently due to “rising costs of costs and industry shifts as well as enduring economic positions” with Bungie stating that their goal is to focus their current development efforts “entirely on Destiny and Marathon”. However, later in the article, Parsons goes into more detail, with specific mention of spreading Bungie talent too thin across several incubation projects as well as the poor reception of Lightfall and the need to delay both The Final Shape and Marathon.
The Final Shape Is the Highest Rated Destiny Expansion in History
Additionally, Parsons reveals that Bungie will undergo two significant changes aside from the layoffs. The first is that over 155 Bungie staff members will be integrated into Sony Interactive Entertainment over the next few quarters, with Parsons claiming that SIE helped them “save a great deal of talent that otherwise would have been affected.”
Secondly, to allow Bungie to focus their efforts solely on Destiny and Marathon, one of their in-progress incubation projects is being spun off to form a brand new studio within PlayStation Studios. This means that the project will continue development without Bungie.
Bungie’s Next Game, Marathon
The layoffs have hit members from all disciplines and all teams within Bungie, including some currently working on Destiny 2 and Marathon, with Parsons specifically mentioning the loss of “most of [their] executive and senior leader roles”. So far, losses of members in the Destiny 2 narrative team, player support team, audio team, and more have been confirmed.
The decision has been met with mass outrage from the Destiny and general gaming community, especially after the monumental critical success of Destiny 2’s latest expansion The Final Shape, which is the highest-rated expansion in the series’ history. Past and current employees of the company – including the recently rehired dmg04, who has been reposting fellow employees who lost their jobs – have spoken out, with many of them condemning Pete Parsons and Bungie’s overall poor leadership once again.
Inexcusable. Industry leading talent being lost, yet again. Accountability falling upon the workers who have pushed the needle to deliver for our community time and time again.
Please maintain focus on those who’ve lost their position & income. Offer help where you can. https://t.co/SSDveUd5uW
— dmg04 (@A_dmg04) July 31, 2024
C-Suite taking accountability for any of this or still just "withholding bonuses" and it'll be "settled in-house"?
Poor leadership has crushed one of the greatest developers of all time.
Retire, Pete.
— Griffin Bennett (@GriffinWB) July 31, 2024
Step down, Pete. https://t.co/I5d7L8kcfq
— Liana Ruppert (@DirtyEffinHippy) July 31, 2024
This round of layoffs means that, since October 31st 2023, Bungie has lost over 300 members of staff, with more set to depart over the next few months as a result of the SIE integration. At the start of 2023, Bungie had over 1150 staff members. Sony purchased Bungie in July of 2022 for $3.6 billion, with them setting over $1 billion aside for employee retention.
While Destiny 2 is currently experimenting with the controversial Episodic form of content delivery, Bungie’s next big title, the Extraction Shooter Marathon, is set to release sometime time 2025. Whether these recent rounds of layoffs will affect either franchise is currently unknown.
SOURCE: The New Path for Bungie Blog Post
