Bungie Just Eliminated 17% of Its Staff

Today Pete Parsons, Bungie CEO announced that they would be eliminating 17% of their staff in sweeping layoffs that would impact the company. The Destiny 2 Final Shape team is reeling today as Bungie employees take to social media to call out CEO of Bungie Pete Parsons for this devastating decision. The Destiny 2 layoffs will result in their incubation project being passed over to Sony, and in addition to the 220 roles eliminated, 155 roles will now fall under PlayStation. The Bungie 2024 layoffs come after a brutal 2023 that also saw reductions.

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[DestinL]

Do you think Bungie can recover from this? Let me know.

[cajunbatman]

So... Where's all of the outRage like Microsoft faced?

[GreatDeamon]

They made the game too HARD.
They made the game into a job.
They took away fun.
They drove away casuals.
They made the game uninviting to new players.

The players that bought D2 were D1 players which came from Halo. All of those are 10 years older. They leave. They will not buy anything from Bungie, they moved on.

[Alacrity-reserved]

Being in a union does not stop layoffs. When there is no budget there is no budget. The judge will rule you cannot force a company to keep what they cannot afford. What the union can do is revise who gets laid off and only if they are in the union. Unfortunately that means if a person was not slated to be laid off the union can exchange that person for someone slated to be laid off. The pecking order is usually based on seniority.

[edes]

Senior management of Bungie has needed to go for years at this point. So disappointing to see a game developer I've loved since OG Halo turn into a dumpster fire.

[inamorta-playertwist]

Bungee is overemployed to begin with.

1000 employees for a studio with only 3 games made since inception?

Why???

Fromsoftware was only 400

Average number of employees are on 250 per studio.

They have over hired and now its coming back in their asses. The top brass are incompetent and are inept yet ordinary people are the ones who got to suffer.

Poor management and poor decision makings.

[mrjase]

the industry nowadays becomes indescribable by the day

[TheOldest]

Didn't Sony spend an additional 1.5 billion to keep people from leaving during the acquisition?
Money well spent I see 🤦‍♂️

[xTYBOx]

Why are we acting like this is just a Bungie issue? The entire games industry expanded from the covid boom and it seems most game companies over hired from the increased demand from people spending more time at home. Investment groups poured money into the industry and the growth wasn’t sustained. It’s unfortunate for all those affected but hopefully it results in the games industry being in a healthier place long term.

[insomniaddictesp]

Bungie leadership do not seem to know how to treat both their customers and their employees. Out of touch, now out of mind.

[DaRkLoRd-rcyu]

I think they did expand unsustainably. They've lost 40% of staff in the last year.


Going from 1232 to 880 staff.
Still a huge number of people working at bungie. But 1200 does sound like a hell of alot. Especially when they were just working on destiny at the time.

[davidneraas]

Pete parsons " we have spread ourselfes to thin" translation we got to greedy we wanted to make as many cashcow low effort games as possible.

[Nauseaa]

I’ve wondered for a while now where Luke Smith is, or his role. It seems that, for quite some time, the Bungie that created Destiny has not existed for years. Cliche of the ship of Theseus springs to mind. The effort Holtzman went through to get there must be galling for him now.

[MongooseMaul]

Union people get laid off all the time as well,
if a company is poorly mismanaged joining a union is not going to stop a company from laying people off

[Austin-swmf]

I feel bad for the folks at Bungie, but the past few rounds of layoffs there have pretty much convinced me that Bungie would have gone under without a buyer.

We only really started hearing about them missing their profit goals after the acquisition, but I highly doubt that's when their problems started.

It does remind me of what happened to Creative Assembly recently. They had a few mediocre historical Total War titles drop, Warhammer 3 has been a mess and only recently started to get back on track, and then Hyenas being cancelled. Sega stepped in, laid people off, and now CA is just the Total War studio for the foreseeable future.

Maybe that's not the worst thing to happen to them, and maybe Bungie being just a Destiny and Marathon studio isn't the worst thing for them, either. They'll be able to focus their efforts on keeping Destiny alive and shipping Marathon in a good state. My only concern is about Marathon succeeding, because if that flops, I feel that Bungie will be gutted.

[davidneraas]

Sony should get rid of bungie its a loosing proposition the 3 billions they wasted on bungie could have been spent on development of more first party studios.

[thingsiplay]

I'm not surprised, after the reports for the financial situation for Bungie and Destiny 2.

[Rus-t-shackelford]

Never played anything from Bungie, but the whole acquisition seemed pointless from day one.

[adrianobarroso]

Can you imagine the headlines had it been on MS's side?

[Vntilator]

There is never any rage in media when Sony are layoffs, because they say's it's normal.
If Microsoft is doing the same, it's not normal to layoff people so the media start to flame Xbox.