The longtime head of Bungie (Destiny 1 and 2), Harold Ryan, had to leave in 2016. He founded a new company, ProbablyMonsters, and aimed to develop high-profile multiplayer games. With Concord, he sold a game to Sony that turned out to be a huge flop. Now his studio is facing the same crisis as his old home Bungie: the teams and projects are too large, projects are being canceled, and employees are being laid off.
This is the idea of ProbablyMonsters: Harold Ryan founded ProbablyMonsters in 2016 in Seattle and gradually brought many former Bungie employees into the company.
Ryan’s idea was to establish several teams that would work independently on AAA MMOs. These MMOs and teams would then be sold to other companies: live service games were clearly the trend of the future, and Ryan and his employees were well-versed in such games thanks to Destiny.
ProbablyMonsters itself was planned as a parent company that generates revenue and supports the developer teams.
In the first years, ProbablyMonsters looked like a hit. The company raised a lot of money through investor rounds in 2021 and eventually managed to sell the studio Firewalk and its game ‘Concord’ to Sony. For ProbablyMonsters, this seemed to be a significant success. But now the company is sliding into a crisis.
ProbablyMonsters lays off employees, cancels project
This is now the crisis: As has now been revealed, ProbablyMonsters has laid off about 50 employees and canceled the project ‘Battle Barge’. The information comes from two employees who were laid off.
According to employees of the company, Battle Barge is already the 3rd project of ProbablyMonsters that has been canceled before it was even presented.
This is what the developers say: In a statement to Game Developer, it is mentioned that they need to “realign” and focus on “smaller games and teams.”
This new format would better fit what the market and players desire.
Sounds like Ryan’s new company is in the same crisis as his old one
Why does this sound like Bungie? At Bungie, they had – with fresh money from Sony and when the economic situation was better and loans were inexpensive – hired many new people and launched several projects. However, they apparently had too many games in development at the same time, too many employees, and too high ongoing costs to sustain.
Bungie had to lay off hundreds of people and cancel all projects except for two. The company had gotten too tangled up and thinned out too much. ProbablyMonsters seems to be encountering similar problems, based on the few pieces of information we currently have.
Currently, ProbablyMonsters has not publicly announced any games. The only game we know is Concord, which was developed at ProbablyMonsters before it was sold to Sony. Concord is regarded as the worst flop in recent gaming history: Why did Concord fail so badly on Steam and PS5 and cost Sony $250 million for a woke disaster?
