In July it was announced that 450 employees were leaving Destiny 2 developer Bungie. As it now turns out, many executives, members of the so-called “C-suite,” have also left the company in recent months, apparently quietly.
Who from the management level left? As TheGamePost reports, some important people, members of the management level, have left Bungie:
Ondraus Jenkis, the “Chief Strategy Officer,” had been at Bungie for 16 years. He left in October 2024, according to his Linkedin profile
Jonny Ebert, who arrived in 2017 and served as chief creative officer for the past 5 years, has also left Bungie. This is evident from his Twitter bio.
Chief Technology Officer Luis Villegas had already changed jobs: He moved to Sony as part of the takeover.
Bungie fired its chief lawyer, Don McGowan, in October 2023 as part of the merger with Sony. He won Bungie millions of US dollars in court in 2023.
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Top people left Bungie after years of working towards nothing
Which departures hurt the most? As Bungie casually mentioned, Luke Smith and Mark Noseworthy have also left the company. Smith was responsible for the highlights of the franchise: the raid The Glass Chamber and the add-on The Taken King.
Smith and Noseworthy had been working on a Destiny spinoff, Payback, for the past few years, but the project was canceled.
Pete Parsons, who many consider to be the face of the crisis, is still with the company.
Fans discuss Sony’s takeover
How is this discussed?? The layoffs are noted calmly on reddit. Here the takeover by Sony is seen as a misfortune, because 6 months after the takeover Destiny 2 got on a bad course due to the “Lightfall” expansion.
Some believe that Sony now wants to minimize the damage at Bungie and pull out the important technology and know-how. This is how you deal with takeovers that don’t go as originally planned.
Others say: Bungie’s developers are highly qualified, but management has always been the company’s weak point.
Still others have hope: History has proven that no matter how bad things were for Bungie, the company always came back and stronger than before.
Bungie gambled away badly
This is what lies behind it: While Destiny was still being published together with Activision-Blizzard, Bungie was working on its own vision and independence. They confidently stated their goal of becoming a leading global entertainment company and worked on new games with Chinese partners such as NetEase.
But Bungie apparently got lost, started too many projects with “cheap money” and hired too many people. Inspired by the takeover by Sony, they continued on this path.
But the economic outlook has deteriorated on several levels. Due to the changed economic situation, money was suddenly no longer so cheap. Due to the flop of the Lightfall expansion, Destiny’s income also dwindled. Ultimately, Sony also applied pressure.
Destiny slipped into financial difficulties and had to lay off many people in the summer of 2024 and stop almost all projects, except for Destiny itself and Marathon. The discontinuation of the new projects is doubly tragic, because developers like Luke Smith have been wasting their time for the last few years on new games that will never appear. In that time they could have helped make Destiny 2 as good as Bungie likes to promise and the fans demand: Destiny 2: The best people have been working on the new Destiny for years – the project is stopped, they are fired