In recent days, the developer of Destiny 2, Bungie, has shocked the gaming community with horror news one after another. When did it all go so wrong? MyMMO author Schuhmann states: pretty much exactly 5 years ago, on September 30, 2019.
These are currently the horror stories from Bungie:
- Bungie has now announced two major rounds of layoffs in a year, in November 2023 and just a few days ago. The studio has now dropped from 1,300 employees to 850.
- In addition, they have canceled projects, meaning new games, that they had worked on for years, some since 2017. It is said that “they took on too much” – currently only Destiny and Marathon are still in development.
- They have also lost some of the best and most experienced employees like Luke Smith. Morale is at an all-time low – employees are openly demanding the resignation of Pete Parsons, who was generously compensated for the purchase by Sony.
The Final Shape could not turn the tide for Destiny:
Bungie aimed to become a leading global entertainment company by 2025
When did it all go wrong? The point at which Destiny took a final wrong turn can be pinpointed to September 30, 2019. At that time, Bungie had separated from Activision Blizzard and was preparing for a future where it wanted to be both publisher and developer again.
In an interview with IGN, the CEO Pete Parsons paints a fantastic picture of the future as he raises hype for Shadowkeep, a ultimately weak expansion that was seen as significantly weaker than its predecessor “Forsaken” in the eyes of the gaming press and players. Forsaken had, according to Metacritic, 86% on Xbox One, while Shadowkeep only had 73%.
Parsons states:
- The plan is for Bungie to be one of the “best entertainment companies in the world” by 2025.
- It is already “a wonderful place to work because it has such outstanding and diverse talent”.
- By 2025, they not only want to completely transform Destiny but also create other new worlds like Destiny and launch at least one other major game world.
Parsons emphasizes in the video interview that they have recently hired an extremely high number of outstanding developers.
Bungie overestimated itself – Thought it could achieve everything
What was the problem? The problem from today’s perspective is that Bungie completely overestimated itself in September 2019:
- They thought they could develop many more games by pulling existing developers from Destiny and letting them lead new teams with newly hired developers.
- They believed Destiny was a fantastic game and would always perform better – especially when it came to exciting new platforms like Steam and Stadia.
- They hoped to manage being both a developer and a publisher simultaneously, just as they did in the 90s.
All these points were complete miscalculations and led to the situation we are seeing now in 2024:
All new games they developed are dead – the executives they pulled to develop the games have been laid off.
Destiny has been selling worse over the years. Lightfall was a low point in 2023, The Final Shape was qualitatively better in 2024 but apparently sold even worse than Lightfall.
The publishing aspect didn’t work out at all – in 2022 Sony bought the company.
Parsons, however, does not see the mistakes as his fault; he believes they were simply unlucky. He cites negative economic developments as causes for the problems, both in general and specifically in the gaming industry. He also points to the poor quality of Lightfall.
As the CEO Pete Parsons, who once praised the future, now admits, they were too ambitious in the last 5 years and are now paying the price. Parsons himself is under heavy criticism, not least because he did not stand by his employees when Bungie was in trouble but needed his money for other things: Boss should have waived his salary – instead bought an absurdly expensive car a month after the layoffs.
