Insider Gaming claims to have new details on the changes happening to Bungie.
Yesterday, Bungie CEO Pete Parsons revealed that 220 staff will be laid off, and 155 staff will be moved to other Sony Interactive Entertainment studios or departments. While the layoffs represent a loss of 15 % of employees, tallying everyone leaving Bungie actually adds up to the company shrinking by roughly one-third of its original headcount.
Insider Gaming has collected what details have come out from employees. All departments across Bungie have been affected, with people working in QA, player support, art, sound, and music revealing they were among those laid off.
One particularly harsh detail when it comes to these layoffs is that many of Bungie’s employees did not learn they were laid off until the post went online. For many of them, the news broke secondhand, as word about the announcement spread online across platforms like Twitter, reddit, and the many popular gaming forums like ResetEra.
We certainly would be remiss if we didn’t make comparisons to the layoffs that happened at Bungie last year, and the bigger picture coming out of that. While the company did not share as many details with the public, it came to light that they fired 100 employees then, and that it was Bungie’s choice to make these layoffs, not Sony.
At the time, the choice to lay off employees was attributed to the poor performance of Destiny 2’s latest expansion, Lightfall. However, that was not the situation that we are facing today. Newzoo data revealed that Destiny 2 ranked at number 5 in top revenue for June 2024, because of the success of its latest and final expansion, The Final Shape.
So we have to face a different reality, and perhaps trust Pete Parsons at his word here. Bungie apparently made wrong decisions, in trying to produce too many games at the same time. Their resources got stretched out too thin, but this did not lead to The Final Shape turning out poorly.
Instead, they took too many risks on the business side, and as a result, they were running themselves into bankruptcy, as a Sony company. Under these circumstances, it’s clear that they would no longer be allowed to keep going in the direction that they did, especially since Sony’s CFO Hiroki Totoki was acting CEO of PlayStation in the time between the releases of Lightfall and The Final Shape.
Some fans seem to want to debate how culpable Sony is in Bungie’s mistakes now leading to mass layoffs, so let’s set things straight. Bungie’s management made these mistakes on their own, but Sony is ultimately responsible. While their agreement allowed Bungie some independence, this doesn’t mean Sony wasn’t allowed to intervene. Totoki may have taken too long assessing the state of Bungie and other studios, because they could have done this pivot earlier, or found other ways to handle the situation.
Sony and Bungie both failed their employees. These developers just made some of the best Destiny 2 content in years, and are some of the brightest and most talented developers the industry has ever seen.
We are truly sorry for everyone affected by Bungie’s restructuring, and that includes the people moving to other Sony studios, and also the people who are going to stay. Those remaining Bungie developers will now have to face an even harder task, are likely to take misdirected anger from the fans for their work, and now know that doing a good job won’t be enough to protect their jobs.
We also wish the best for the people about to leave Sony and Bungie, and hope they can find placement back in the video game industry.
