Gaming IndustryBungie lays off 220 developers in shocking bloodbath as it aggressively refocuses on Destiny and Marathon: ‘We were overly ambitious’When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
Gaming IndustryBungie lays off 220 developers in shocking bloodbath as it aggressively refocuses on Destiny and Marathon: ‘We were overly ambitious’When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
(Image credit: Bungie)
In yet another bloodbath duringa terrible two yearsfor the games industry, Bungie has announced that it’s laying off 220 people—roughly 17% of its workforce—across “every level of the company, including most of our executive and senior leader roles.”
In a blog post titled “The New Path for Bungie,” Bungie CEO Pete Parsons announced that “Due to rising costs of development and industry shifts as well as enduring economic conditions, it has become clear that we need to make substantial changes to our cost structure,” and shift the studio’s development focus entirely over to Destiny and upcoming extraction shooterMarathon. The new round of layoffs comes less than a year afterBungie’s last bloodletting in October 2023, the casualties of which included veteran Halo composer Michael Salvatori.
Bungie is pitching the whole thing as a bloody but necessary pivot for the company, “a necessary decision to refocus our studio” after it spread itself too thin. Per Parsons, Bungie’s goal for over half a decade has been “to ship games in three enduring, global franchises.” To that end, the studio “set up several incubation projects, each seeded with senior development leaders from out existing teams,” but came to realise “that this model stretched our talent too thin, too quickly,” and overburdened studio support structures already preoccupied with Destiny and Marathon.
The company also points at its “rapid expansion” in 2023, which “ran headlong into a broad economic slowdown, a sharp downturn in the games industry, our quality miss with Destiny 2: Lightfall, and the need to give both The Final Shape and Marathon the time needed,” as factors that have led to the layoffs. “We were overly ambitious, our financial safety margins were subsequently exceeded, and we began running in the red.”
Which means 220 people are out of a job, and it’s currently unclear how many—if any—of them had any involvement in the decisions which have apparently overstretched the studio.
The studio is also spinning out one of those aforementioned incubation projects “to form a new studio within PlayStation Studios to continue its promising development.” It’s set to be an “action game set in a brand-new science-fantasy universe.”
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All of which, I have to imagine, will be scant comfort to the 220 people who now have to find new jobs, though Bungie at least says it’s offering those affected “a generous exit package, including severance, bonus and health coverage.”
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