As the pandemic has entered its third year, many companies are at a crossroads of whether to become permanently remote or ask workers to return to the office; Bungie has announced its next move on the matter. The company behind Destiny 2 and the original Halo games has revealed it is now a “digital-first” studio and has published numerous job listings offering “fully remote” work.
The past few years have created a gaming industry where game delays, console shortages, and half-baked games have become an expectation rather than an exception. This of course has been the result of the pandemic creating difficult working conditions for developers who were forced to scramble and cope with working from home when the infrastructure to do so was basically non-existent. Now that most companies have had the time to conform to working from home, many companies like Bungie have decided to embrace the change and have moved to be fully remote.
Bungie is now offering fully remote work in a few select states which include Washinton, California, Oregon, Illinois, Florida, North Carolina, and Texas. The game studio will presumably be adding more states as the transition settles. A quick look at Bungie’s career page shows the company is currently offering fully remote positions in art, audio, business operations, consumer products, engineering, game design, information technology, production, publishing and marketing, test/QA, and UI/UX. The current list of open positions is massive, with almost every category offering a long list of available jobs.
Bungie CEO Pete Parsons said on the shift to being digital-first, “Over the past two years, we have redefined how we work at Bungie. The transition to work-from-home wasn’t easy, but the results speak for themselves. Today, it’s clear that a digital-first workplace isn’t the future of work – it is already here, and We. Are. All. In.” It will be interesting to see what developers now follow suit.
