The long-time boss of Bungie (Destiny 1 and 2), Harold Ryan, had to leave in 2016. He founded a new company, ProbablyMonsters, and wanted to develop high-level multiplayer players. With Concord, he sold Sony a game that turned out to be a huge flop. Now his studio is in the same crisis as his old home Bungie: the teams and projects are too big, projects are being stopped and employees are being laid off.
This is idea from ProbablyMonsters: Harold Ryan founded ProbablyMonsters in Seattle in 2016 and over time brought many former Bungie employees into the company.
Ryan’s idea was to create several teams that would work independently on AAA MMOs. These MMOs and teams would then be sold to other companies: Live service games were clearly the trend of the future and thanks to Destiny, Ryan and his employees were familiar with exactly such games.
ProbablyMonsters itself was planned as an umbrella company that would raise money and support the development teams.
ProbablyMonsters looked like a hit in its first few years. The company raised a lot of money through investor rounds in 2021 and was finally able to sell the Firewalk studio and its game “Concord” to Sony. This was apparently a huge success for ProbablyMonsters. But now the company is slipping into crisis.
Sony shows the first gameplay of the new PvP shooter Concord
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ProbablyMonsters lays off employees, discontinues project
This is the crisis now: It has now been announced that ProbablyMonsters has laid off around 50 employees and discontinued the “Battle Barge” project. The information comes from two employees who were laid off.
As company employees report, BattleBarge is ProbablyMonsters’ third project that was canceled before it was even presented.
This is what the developers say: In a statement to game developers it said that they had to “reposition themselves” and focus on “smaller games and teams.”
This new format would better fit what the market and players want.
Sounds like Ryan’s new company is in the same crisis as his old one
Why does this sound like Bungie? At Bungie – with fresh money from Sony and when the economic situation was better and loans didn’t cost interest – they hired a lot of new people and built projects from the ground up. But apparently there were too many games in development at the same time, too many employees and too high ongoing costs to manage them.
Bungie had to lay off hundreds of people and shut down all but two projects. The company had become disorganized and had become too thin. ProbablyMonsters appears to have run into similar problems, based on the little information we have at the moment.
At the moment, ProbablyMonsters has not publicly announced a game yet. We only know Concord, which was created at ProbalyMonsters before it was sold to Sony. Concord is considered the worst flop in recent gaming history: Why did Concord fail so badly on Steam and PS5 and did Sony burn $250 million on a woke catastrophe?