Bungie is conducting yet another round of massive layoffs today. The Destiny 2 studio announced the elimination of 220 jobs, around 17% of the company’s current workforce.
Readers will recall that the company was smacked by significant layoffs less than a year ago, after Destiny 2’s 2023 revenues missed expectations and Sony – which acquired the studio back in 2022 for the equivalent $3.7B – intervened.
“Due to rising costs of development and industry shifts as well as enduring economic conditions, it has become clear that we need to make substantial changes to our cost structure and focus development efforts entirely on Destiny and Marathon,” Bungie’s Pete Parsons says.
“These actions will affect every level of the company, including most of our executive and senior leader roles. Today is a difficult and painful day, especially for our departing colleagues, all of which have made important and valuable contributions to Bungie. Our goal is to support them with the utmost care and respect. For everyone affected by this job reduction, we will be offering a generous exit package, including severance, bonus and health coverage. I realize all of this is hard news, especially following the success we have seen with The Final Shape. But as we’ve navigated the broader economic realities over the last year, and after exhausting all other mitigation options, this has become a necessary decision to refocus our studio and our business with more realistic goals and viable financials.”
An additional 155 jobs will be integrated into Sony itself as the team behind at least one of the company’s unannounced games will reform under the PlayStation umbrella. If you read between the lines here, it sounds as if The Final Shape performed well, just not well enough to support the “several” incubation projects Bungie was trying to cook behind the scenes, particularly given the current games industry situation (which was in large part created by this exact type of corporate overextension in hiring and borrowing, but we digress). Moreover, the fact that “most of [Bungie’s] executive and senior leader roles” are affected – in addition to news that Sony’s Herman Hulst is now running Bungie –Â suggests that not only are those in-progress games canceled but the company is well on its way to becoming just another Sony substudio instead of the more independent satellite its former bosses hoped it would be.
“We were overly ambitious, our financial safety margins were subsequently exceeded, and we began running in the red,” Parsons admits. “We still have over 850 team members building Destiny and Marathon.” Note he says Destiny there, not Destiny 2, which ought to further fuel Destiny 3 rumors – or would if this weren’t such depressing news for the company and its employees overall.
