GamesFPSDestiny 2Former Bungie lawyer says the studio’s ‘management failure’ led to Sony ‘forcing them to get their heads out of their asses’When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
GamesFPSDestiny 2Former Bungie lawyer says the studio’s ‘management failure’ led to Sony ‘forcing them to get their heads out of their asses’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)
Over the weekend, former Bungie general counsel Don McGowan gave his take on the ongoing turmoil at Bungie and the recent redirection for Destiny 2. “Much though it pains me to say this, it appears that Sony’s inflicting some discipline on my former colleagues may have forced them to fix the things that were wrong with the game,” McGowan said in aLinkedIn postpublished on Saturday.
“To be clear: I’m not talking about the layoffs,” McGowan continued. “I’m talking about forcing them to get their heads out of their asses and focus on things like: implementing a method of new player acquisition; not just doing fan service for the fans in the Bungie C-suite; and running the game like a business. Good. I still have friends in that environment and I’d like them to keep jobs.”
McGowan’s LinkedIn post was a response to Bungie’s reveal last week of itsnew plans for Destiny 2’s content structure, which will abandon its major, annual releases of linear story expansions in favor of smaller, more-frequent updates with a greater emphasis on repeatable activities. The shift in Destiny 2 strategy follows Bungie’s two rounds of major layoffs sinceSony acquired the studio for $3.6 billionin 2022.
According to McGowan, who’d been Bungie’s general counsel from 2020 to 2023, studio executives were intent on continuing to operate as though it was an independent company, even after the Sony acquisition. “There were a lot of egos for whom it was important to pretend that ‘nothing would change,'” McGowan said. “I remember sitting there during the deal saying, ‘Do you think Sony describes this as them getting to pay $3.6 billion for the right to have no input into what Bungie does?’ That was exactly what a lot of people thought.”
In comparison, McGowan said Bungie’s new plans for Destiny 2 are “the things you do to run a franchise, not to keep making the game you and your friends have mastered, or to chase trends.”
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While I admit that there’s something refreshing about McGowan’s frank assessment of studio management’s responsibility in Bungie’s repeated crises, it’s unfortunate that the Sony discipline he describes has fallen entirely on the former employees he says don’t deserve the blame. The C-Suite at Bungie, at least for the moment, seems to be continuing unscathed.
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