A former community manager of Destiny 2 spoke about working at Bungie. The term ‘Crunch’ was also a topic.
Destiny 2 is currently in the most important phase of the year. The newest expansion ‘The Final Shape’ is finally out and managed to attract over 300,000 players to the Steam servers on release day. On Friday evening, the race for the World-First began, ending with a surprise.
But while Destiny players are giving their best in the fight against the Witness, the statements of former community manager Liana Ruppert are making waves in the Destiny 2 and Bungie community. She commented in a video about the working conditions at Bungie and the layoffs at the end of 2023. She herself was also affected by the layoffs.
We asked Bungie for a statement regarding the contents of the video and will add it to the article as soon as it arrives.
Who is it about?
- Liana Ruppert was Senior Community Manager at Bungie from October 2021 to November 2023.
- Previously, Ruppert worked at the US publisher ‘Prima Games’ and the magazine ‘Game Informer’.
- Today, Ruppert works as a community manager at Prime Video and is responsible for the Fallout TV series and Vox Machina Season 3.
Ruppert criticizes work culture, crunch, and toxicity
What is this video about? In the video on her personal YouTube channel, Ruppert talks about her time at Bungie and states that her dream job turned into ‘hell’. She also addresses the layoffs in November 2023 and how crunch was an issue in the development of The Final Shape.
Initially, she explains why she made this video. She says many users wrongly assume on social media that she is critical of Bungie or the gaming industry because she was affected by the layoffs.
Ruppert then elaborates that she has been speaking out on such topics for years and wants to explain in the video why she talks about it so much and why the layoffs were hard for her.
You can watch Liana Ruppert’s complete video on YouTube:
From paradise to hell in just one year
What does Ruppert say about her time at Bungie? Ruppert explains in the video that the layoffs did not upset or surprise her. Rather, she was surprised at how callously these layoffs were handled by Bungie, as the studio had promised that they would not be like that, and she believed it.
Then Ruppert shares that she never drew boundaries between her work and personal life and fully immersed herself in work, which led to health problems. She then talks about how the release of The Final Shape caused her feelings of anxiety:
I was afraid of the release of Final Shapes because I would panic every time a new season came out. Depending on the time of day and whether I was unbalanced or balanced, I would have a panic attack if Destiny was even mentioned to me. I tried many times to play the game before the release of Final Shape, but I couldn’t get past the loading screen because I had a panic attack.
Subsequently, Ruppert says it ‘deeply hurts’ her what happened, as she thought she had found her dream job. The job she wanted to stay in forever.
However, she now sees how ‘toxic’ that dream job was: ‘My first year was heaven, paradise, I couldn’t imagine any other place. My second year was hell. And there was a lot of malice and a lot of really bad things that will eventually come to light, but not today.’
She was afraid of the release of The Final Shape because the expansion meant so much to everyone – including her – and she feared she wasn’t mentally strong enough to participate in the release of the expansion or to play it.
Disappointment instead of ‘oasis of healthy work culture’
What does she say about the layoffs? Ruppert explains that Bungie is seen as a kind of ‘Mecca’ for game developers, and many developers have contacted her and other employees because they would like to work for Bungie to escape the toxicity of other employers in the gaming industry.
According to Ruppert, Bungie is perceived as a kind of ‘oasis of healthy work culture’ and some people have left significantly better-paying jobs to work for Bungie. But often, it was not that ‘oasis’.
She emphasizes that she does not want to do a ‘disservice’ to the people trying to improve the work culture at Bungie. There have been positive changes at Bungie, and she does not want to overshadow the efforts made, but she believes that even more significant changes are being blocked:
Unfortunately, many of the more important changes are blocked by higher powers because it’s not always convenient to implement these changes. It seems that many of these changes have only been made to either save face or to achieve a short-term gain. In the long run, however, there has always been some kind of resistance, and that’s an important reason why we talk about layoffs as a weapon, as many of the affected individuals have been very loud advocates for the union and for improving internal affairs and working conditions.
Bungie has implemented layoffs heartlessly
Additionally, Ruppert believes that the way the layoffs were conducted harmed Bungie – not only because many other employees subsequently left the company. Ruppert estimates that what hit Bungie hardest was that management invested time and effort to make it look like Bungie was a company that wouldn’t conduct mass layoffs. But then they did it ‘in the most heartless way.’
This heartless method of laying off employees is what upsets Ruppert. There were reportedly people who moved for this job. She herself had to sell her house, which was half paid off.
As another example, she mentions a case of an employee who had a stroke, worked hard to return to work, and then was laid off:
Another person literally had a stroke, from which they recovered for a year due to the stress of the job. He worked really hard to recover […], only to finally recover after years of work and be able to return to work, just to be laid off.
Moreover, she criticizes that layoffs were used as weapons to get rid of employees who were trying to create a healthier work culture.
The criticized work culture also includes the term crunch. Employees are expected to work overtime and extra hours to meet certain project deadlines – such as a tightly scheduled release date.
Crunch was also the case in the development of the latest Destiny expansion: ‘Crunch was definitely a key factor for Final Shape, and I’m so glad it became [the DLC], because there were so many things that the developers didn’t like, and this shift gave them the time to change it.’
Large waves of layoffs are not only happening at Bungie; many employees at other developers have also had to abandon their dream jobs in recent months and years. This includes a former technician from Blizzard: Engineer talks about how his dream job in gaming died: ‘Was fired after 13 years at Blizzard’
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