While Sony paid $3.7 billion for Bungie, including $1.2 billion for staff retention, the developer has now laid off a number of employees on Monday, including some of its most forward-facing team members.
While the totals are not yet known, many Bungie employees have posted that they have been laid off from the company, including a long-time social media lead and two of Destiny’s community managers. Reports are these cuts are mostly focused in publishing, but there are reports they may be some in engineering as well.
Former community manager DMG, who was harassed in real life by a player resulting in a Bungie lawsuit against the offender, posted about how “continued echoes of poor decisions” from “poor management” led to moments like this.
While Destiny has always had its ups and downs as a series, this past year with the release of Lightfall marked a low point with the expansion being one of the game’s worst-received ever. Bungie is about to wrap up a major Destiny 2 saga in the coming months with the release of its Final Shape expansion, but things are somewhat nebulous after that, as D2 development continues in live service format with no word about a true sequel on the way.
Meanwhile, Bungie has revealed Marathon, its upcoming extraction shooter, and a more lighthearted multiplayer game current codenamed Gummy Bears. But at least Marathon is still a very long ways out, and in a hyper-competitive shooter landscape, it’s not clear if even Bungie’s storied history as an FPS developer is enough to make it the kind of megahit that they and Sony need. Destiny 2 has been the profit driver here for a long time, and if that game is faltering, well, here we are.
This will also no doubt raise questions about Sony management, as they bought Bungie both for its own games (which will remain multiplatform, however) and so Bungie could advise other studios on live service titles, being an expert in the space. But recent reports indicate that Sony may be scaling back its enormous live game ambitions from what they’ve said previously, and we supposedly heard that Bungie said that The Last of Us Factions from Naughty Dog wasn’t up to par, and the fate of that project now remains unclear.
But the problem with these layoffs is that of course it is not management who is out after making many of the decisions which led to this point, it is lower rung employees who have nothing to do with the situation, and in this case, social/comms teams are already extremely underpaid and unappreciated in the industry. This is a story we’ve heard time and time again amidst a host of industry layoffs, and Bungie is the latest in a long line of studios where similar situations have unfolded.
It’s an extremely unfortunate situation at Bungie, and somewhat anger-inducing that it’s come to this point where they should have every resource at their disposal, especially after the Sony acquisition, to avoid something like this. I will continue to investigate exactly how deep these cuts today run.
Update: Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier is reporting that The Final Shape will be delayed from February 2024 to June 2024, and Marathon will not arrive until 2025.
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