Destiny 2 celebrates summer as Bungie addresses healthcare, racial justice, and its acquisition by Sony

July 15, 2022 2:30 PM

We’re deep into the summertime here in the northern hemisphere, and Destiny 2 is preparing to mark the season by bringing back its Solstice summer event next week. Bungie’s weekly newsletter offers up more information about Solstice 2022, with a look at the event card, cosmetics, and armor upgrading process.

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There’s otherwise news to report regarding the Destiny 2 studio itself: A trans employee of Bungie shared a letter detailing the difficulty she has had in securing gender affirming care from the studio’s insurance provider, which earned a response from Bungie on the matter:

“We have had an employee reach out internally to share their lived experience and that it was important to them to also share publicly to help create awareness for this issue. We support them and appreciate their willingness to engage with us to address the issues that they and other trans/non-binary employees have faced when pursuing gender-affirming care.

“We are committed to the long-term work needed to address the issues raised. We have been engaged in conversations with many of our employees who are a part of Trans@Bungie to center their experiences to inform and shape that work.”

In other Bungie studio news, the game’s charitable Bungie Foundation announced that it has donated $963,230 USD to fund research being done at Yale on creating new techniques, coding, and diverse character development processes in order to combat racial bias in game dev. “[T]he Bungie Foundation hopes that donating these funds to Yale researchers will lead to more diverse games being developed, giving millions of users the ability to see themselves in characters’ appearances and helping create racial equity within the industry,” reads part of the presser.

Finally, today is the day that Sony has officially acquired Bungie. It’s done.

The agreement to acquire Bungie has closed. So now we can officially say… welcome to the PlayStation family, @Bungie! pic.twitter.com/x5jVmelaxl

— PlayStation (@PlayStation) July 15, 2022