Destiny 2 studio was in serious trouble well before this week’s layoffs, says report
Destiny 2 studio Bungie was in serious trouble before PlayStation acquired it in 2022, Stephen Totilo of Game File reported, which may explain why a second round of steep job cuts rocked the longtime stalwart of AAA video games development on Wednesday.
The studio shed another 220 jobs this week, despite what looks like an otherwise successful launch of Destiny 2’s last expansion, The Final Shape. Totilo reported those cuts were in the works for months because, according to his sources, Bungie had overstated its financial health before Sony acquired it.
“Wednesday’s cuts were needed to stop continued losses that amounted to an ongoing reality check,” he wrote, attributing that to three former studio employees.
Bungie chief executive Pete Parsons announced the job losses on Wednesday in a blog post, attributing them to “costs of development and industry shifts as well as enduring economic conditions.” He acknowledged the contrast of the dire news against the success of The Final Shape, which launched June 4.
But Destiny 2 is a free-to-play live-service game; that gives it an open-ended but less direct monetization model, more dependent on the optional purchase of expansions and other content. Totilo wrote that the studio had overstated its financial prospects when Sony (present market capitalization of about $100 billion) picked it up for $3.6 billion in February 2022.
Parsons, in the post announcing the dismissals, said Bungie hit trouble in 2023 when the Destiny 2: Lightfall expansion came in as a “quality miss,” amid other industry-wide conditions. “We were overly ambitious, our financial safety margins were subsequently exceeded, and we began running in the red,” he said.
The job cuts, nearly all of them in development roles, amount to 17% of the work force, Parsons wrote. Additionally, another 155 workers will be shifted into Sony Interactive Entertainment’s overall operation “over the next few quarters,” he said. That will leave Bungie with about 850 on staff.
Bungie is also handing off development of “an action game set in a brand-new science-fantasy universe” to SIE, which will be developed by a new studio in the overall PlayStation Studios operation. Neither the game nor its studio have a name yet.
How have the Bungie layoffs affected employees?
Current and former employees have since weighed in with withering accounts of how the layoffs have affected them. A former producer, Kelly Jin, says she was dismissed right before she was due to receive maternity leave. A Destiny fan even researched on X Parsons’ purchase history of 17 collector-quality automobiles (at a combined $2.3 million) adding to an already bad look for the studio.
Destiny 2: The Final Shape launched on June 4 for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X. It’s the last expansion for Destiny 2.
Bungie is now working on a revival of Marathon, the first-person shooter series it developed in the 1990s for MacOS computers. It was announced in May 2023 and does not yet have a launch window, though it is expected sometime next year.
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