The developer of Destiny 2, Bungie, announced this evening, July 31, that it is laying off 450 employees, including many senior managers and the most experienced employees. The studio needs to slim down and will stop or give up all projects except Destiny 2 and the new Extraction shooter Marathon.
This is the announcement: Bungie boss Pete Parsons said in a statement (via Bungie) that they made the “difficult decision” to eliminate 220 roles, which is about 17% of the studio’s workforce.
The people who were let go included most of the leadership team and several senior leaders. Among them is Robert Brookes, who is leaving Destiny after 5 years (via x.com). He was Senior Narrative Designer.
In addition, all projects are being discontinued except for Destiny 2 and Marathon.
The terrible Lightfall expansion is cited as the reason for the current problems:
Destiny 2: Lightfall – Launch Trailer
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Numbers are even worse – Bungie actually loses 450 employees
How many people do you really lose? In addition to the 220 people who are being laid off, 155 employees who previously worked at Bungie are moving to Sony. If Sony hadn’t taken them on, they would have been fired too, says Parsons.
Another 75 employees will be relocated to a new studio. They will work on a game that was previously developed at Bungie. It is said to be an action game in a new science-fantasy universe.
So Bungie is not just losing 220 people, but actually 450 employees. The studio is shrinking from 1,300 employees to 850.
Lightfall disappoints
Why is that? Parsons says that over the last five years, they have wanted to build three global franchises and have promoted people from existing teams to do so. The original teams were currently working on Destiny 2 and Marathon.
But these promotions would have thinned out the development teams too much, and they would have had to hire more people than they could support.
Added to this was a deterioration in the general economic situation, especially in the gaming industry, and the disappointing Destiny 2: Lightfall. In addition, more work was put into The Final Shape and Marathon to improve the quality.
CEO admits: “We were too ambitious” – Bungie made losses
In the original, Pete Parsons says:
For over five years, our goal has been to develop games in three enduring, global franchises. To achieve this goal, we launched several incubation projects, each staffed with senior developers from our existing teams. We eventually realized that this model overwhelmed our talent too quickly. It also forced us to scale our studio support structures to a larger level than we could realistically support given our two main products in development – Destiny and Marathon.
In addition, our rapid expansion in 2023 ran head-on into a general economic slowdown, a sharp downturn in the gaming industry, our lack of quality on Destiny 2: Lightfall, and the need to give both The Final Shape and Marathon the time they needed to ensure both projects delivered the quality our players expect and deserve. We were overambitious, our financial safety margins were subsequently exceeded, and we began to go into the red.
Once this new trajectory became clear, we knew we had to change our course and pace, and we did everything we could to avoid today’s outcome. Despite intense efforts by our leadership and product teams to address our financial challenges, these steps simply weren’t enough.
What happens next? Parsons says they have 850 people working on Destiny and Marathon and will continue to make great games.
Sony criticized Bungie’s management in February 2024
This is the background: This anger became apparent after Bungie was openly criticized by Sony in February 2024. Sony said something like: Bungie has a lot of competence and good employees, but it criticized the management for being too lax with money and schedules. There is “room for improvement.”
Sony bought Bungie in 2022 for $3.6 billion.
In general, Destiny has been on a bad path since the release of Destiny 2: Vanilla in 2017. Forsaken, a strong expansion, came in 2018, but it didn’t bring back enough players that were lost in 2017 with the terrible release year of Destiny 2. As a result, Activision Blizzard terminated the partnership: Destiny 2 without Activision Blizzard was supposed to be great, but has been disappointing so far