The wave of layoffs at Bungie is the sad result of years of management failure. Editor-in-Chief Leya bids farewell to Destiny and the studio behind it.
Without Destiny, I wouldn’t be sitting here writing this article for you.
Because Destiny helped MeinMMO make its breakthrough more than ten years ago. The game was revolutionary and brought the MMO to consoles – packaged in a loot shooter with unrivaled gunplay. We were there to explain what a vendor reset is. Xur regularly led to server downtime with us. Even raids were new and exciting. An intimate community formed around the game, growing alongside us.
I have never actively played Destiny myself. But I have accompanied it and its Guardians on MeinMMO for ten years. I have read your stories. As an observer in the background, I rejoiced, laughed, and got frustrated with you.
When I read the news about the roughly 400 people laid off who will no longer work on Destiny, it boiled up in me again:
Anger.
The creative heart has been ripped out, a studio sacrificed
I am not angry at the game. I am certainly not angry at the roughly 400 people who are now left without a job. No, my anger is not directed at the VFX artists, narrative designers, community managers, or game testers.
The creative heart was thrown out because the upper management miscalculated. The past few weeks have shown once again what talent and quality are now being let go. After the pressure subsided and everything seemed indifferent, the developers had more fun than ever and released a final update that temporarily made Destiny 2 the top seller on Steam.
By that time, the layoffs were presumably already determined. But this last flourish made it clear once again how much potential and love for the game were squandered. Also from the community’s side: The Guardians have proven that their hearts are still with Destiny – even if not every update was met with happiness. From my accustomed observation post, I saw a struggle and disbelief. It could not be the end.
But unfortunately, it is. While the team in the engine room did everything to keep the ship afloat, the management on the bridge knowingly ran into the iceberg – and the journey into this inevitable collision started years ago.
From the gambling captain and expensive cars
The problems at Bungie did not arise overnight. They are the result of years of arrogant missteps by a management that simply gambled it all away.
It began with the urge for absolute freedom: The expensive break from Activision in 2019 was celebrated as a triumph. But management blindly underestimated what it costs to keep a content monster like Destiny 2 alive without the financial backing of a mega-corporation. In addition, a headquarters in Bellevue, Washington – one of the most expensive tech spots in the world right next to Microsoft and Amazon – means you have to pay top salaries to talent.
The forward escape was a gigantic gamble: The sale to Sony for $3.6 billion in 2022. Management promised sales targets that could not be met. When expectations fell, reality struck. The result of this denial of reality is evident today in Sony’s financial statements: The tech giant had to register a massive impairment of $766 million for Bungie. Of this, $201 million of those losses are attributable to Destiny 2, as the astronomical maintenance costs ate up the revenues, while over $200 million were pumped into the struggling Marathon.
While the staff later worried about their existence, the boss accumulated status symbols: While developers in the studio tried to plug the financial holes, management seemingly lived on another planet. It crowns the tragedy with the height of decadence that CEO Pete Parsons spent millions on private classic cars on auction sites in the months before and during the first waves of layoffs. This was in 2023 when Bungie surprisingly let go of around 100 employees shortly after the revenues from the Lightfall expansion plummeted. Pete Parsons callously referred to it as a “sad day at Bungie” at that time.
Management operated as if there were no tomorrow – and now the employees, who have to clear their desks in Bellevue, are paying the tab.
Bungie: Just a name on paper
And where does Bungie stand today? The once proud studio that gave us Halo and Destiny is just a lifeless shell. De facto, the team has been halved in a panic to bet everything on Marathon. But let’s face reality: A live-service game like Destiny 2 cannot survive without the hands that nurture it.
It will die a slow, agonizing death. With a floundering niche project behind it and a deeply wounded community at its back, I give Bungie in this form no more than a year. Sony will completely swallow the studio, restructure it, and reduce the name Bungie to a pure marketing brand.
Bungie is unfortunately not an isolated case, but a sad example of an entire industry that has massively miscalculated in recent years. Driven by a general economic crisis and an insatiable greed for the next billion-dollar live-service hit, the giants of the industry – whether Sony, Ubisoft, or EA – have grossly miscalculated.
The bill for these utopian growth fantasies is never paid by the bosses in their ivory towers. It is always paid by the people who actually create these games with their blood, sweat, and tears.
The silver lining: room for something new
And yet, amidst all this tragedy, there is a small silver lining on the horizon. Because crises, as painful as they are, always create space for something new. Gaming history has often shown: When creative minds break free from the shackles of greedy publishers and incompetent management, true magic often arises.
Maybe right now, ex-Bungie employees are forming new indie studios. Perhaps they will create the next big thing and gift us in a few years with what Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 promises for the RPG genre: a fresh, passion-driven highlight – just for the loot shooter genre. Without the burden of overpriced headquarters in Bellevue and without bosses who prefer to collect luxury cars rather than protect their staff.
We will have to wait and see. But until then, I can only say one thing: Thank you to the roughly 400 creators who made Destiny what it was for us for ten years. Of course, not every expansion was a highlight. But you created something that others only dream of: You built a passionate community that now departs with you. They fought with you until the end.
You did not deserve this exit.
And now to you: What does this final downsizing trigger in you? Do you think Bungie will survive the next year, or have you already internalized the end of the studio and Destiny 2? Let us know your thoughts and your best Destiny moments in the comments.
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