Bungie’s chief executive officer Pete Parsons has announced via a blog post on the studios official website that Bungie is laying off 220 employees, which comes to roughly 17% of its total workforce.
The post is titled “The New Path For Bungie,” and goes on to describe the changes, namely the mass layoff but also the fact that another 155 roles are being integrated into Sony Interactive Entertainment.
Parsons is also quick to point out that these changes don’t just impact developers on a lower rung of the studios ladder, but “every level of the company, including most of our executive and senior leader roles.”
Regarding what got Bungie to this place, Parsons cited “economic realities over the last year,” and said that this choice only came “after exhausting all other mitigation options,” calling the layoff “a necessary decision to refocus our studio and our business with more realistic goals and viable financials.”
Parsons says at multiple points in the post that this decision came after the studio tried everything else, though on that point it’s interesting to note that when Bungie laid off 100 developers last November, the studio allegedly told employees that cutting executives salaries was not an option for avoiding layoffs. Perhaps that report explains why Parsons makes it clear at the top of the post that this layoff also impacts senior level staff.
Parsons further describes the decisions that he says led to these “necessary” layoffs by laying out how the studio tried to develop three major projects at once, which resulted in the studio having “stretched our talent too thin, too quickly.”
He also went on to blame the industry’s economic downturn in 2023, and called Destiny 2’s previous Lightfall expansion a “quality miss.”
“In 2023, our rapid expansion 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 to ensure both projects deliver at the quality our players expect and deserve. We were overly ambitious, our financial safety margins were subsequently exceeded, and we began running in the red.
After this new trajectory became clear, we knew we had to change our course and speed, and we did everything we could to avoid today’s outcome. Even with exhaustive efforts undertaken across our leadership and product teams to resolve our financial challenges, these steps were simply not enough.”
Parsons isn’t wrong to admit that Lightfall was a miss – while we liked it more than most here at PSU, fans and critics largely disproved of the expansion.
But The Final Shape is not regarded as a miss, and to see these cuts still happen is more than disappointing. We’ve seen Bungie make statements to players and fans before admitting their mistakes, and while at least acknowledging the mistakes is something, it means nothing if the studio isn’t actually working to change and improve.
Hopefully those developers who now find themselves out of work due to poor decisions made by Parsons and other top-level executives are able to recover quickly and land on their feet.
And for Parsons and his crew, players can only hope that they mean these words this time, and that things will get better, so we don’t have to be back here in another few months, seeing more developers lose jobs for decisions and mistakes they didn’t make.
Source – [Bungie]