The developer of Destiny 2, Bungie, announced this evening, on July 31, that they are cutting 450 employees, including many executives and the most experienced staff. The studio needs to streamline and will halt or hand over all projects, except for Destiny 2 and the new extraction shooter, Marathon.
This is the announcement: Bungie’s boss, Pete Parsons, states in a statement (via Bungie) that they have made the “difficult decision” to eliminate 220 positions. This accounts for about 17% of the studio’s workforce.
Among those laid off were most of the management team and various senior leaders. For instance, Robert Brookes is leaving after 5 years at Destiny (via x.com). He served as a Senior Narrative Designer.
Additionally, they are halting all projects, except for Destiny 2 and Marathon.
The terrible expansion Lightfall is cited as the reason for the current problems:
The numbers are even worse – In fact, Bungie is losing 450 employees
How many people are they actually losing? In addition to the 220 who are being outright fired, 155 employees who have been at Bungie are moving to Sony. If Sony hadn’t taken them over, they would have been fired as well, Parsons says.
75 more employees are being transferred to a new studio. They will work on a game that was previously being developed at Bungie. This game is said to be an action game set in a new science-fantasy universe.
Thus, Bungie is not just losing 220 people, but actually 450 employees. The studio is shrinking from 1,300 employees to 850.
Lightfall disappoints
What is the reason for this? Parsons says that over the last 5 years, they aimed to build 3 global franchises and promoted people from existing teams for that purpose. The actual teams were working on Destiny 2 and Marathon.
But these promotions weakened the development teams too much, and they had to hire more people than they could realistically support.
Additionally, there was a deterioration in the overall economic situation, especially in the gaming industry, and the disappointing Destiny 2: Lightfall. Moreover, they invested more work into The Final Shape and Marathon to ensure quality.
CEO admits: “We were too ambitious” – Bungie made losses
In the original, Pete Parsons says:
For over five years, our goal has been to develop games in three enduring, global franchises. To achieve this, we launched several incubation projects, each staffed with senior developers from our existing teams. We ultimately recognized that this model overwhelmed our talents too quickly. It also forced us to scale our studio support structures to a higher level than we could realistically support given our two primary products in development – Destiny and Marathon.
Furthermore, our rapid expansion in 2023 collided head-on with a general economic downturn, a severe slump in the gaming industry, our quality shortfall with Destiny 2: Lightfall, and the need for The Final Shape and Marathon to have the necessary time to ensure both projects deliver the quality that our players expect and deserve. We were too ambitious, our financial safety nets were subsequently exceeded, and we began to operate at a loss.
Once this new course became clear, we knew we had to change our course and our pace, and we did everything we could to avoid today’s outcome. Despite intense efforts from our leadership and product teams to address our financial challenges, those steps simply weren’t enough.
What happens next? Parsons states that they have 850 people for Destiny and Marathon and will continue to create great games.
Sony criticized Bungie’s management in February 2024
This is the background: This frustration was noticeable after Bungie was openly criticized by Sony in February 2024. Sony essentially said: Although there are plenty of skills and good employees at Bungie, they criticized the leadership for being too lenient with money and schedules. There was “room for improvement.”
Sony acquired Bungie in 2022 for 3.6 billion US dollars.
Overall, Destiny has been on a troubled path since the release of Destiny 2: Vanilla in 2017. While Forsaken was a strong expansion released in 2018, it did not bring back enough players who were lost in 2017 due to the terrible launch year of Destiny 2. Consequently, Activision Blizzard announced the end of their partnership: Destiny 2 without Activision Blizzard was supposed to be great, but has been disappointing so far.
