It's a sad case of another day, another round of mass layoffs at a game studio. On this occasion, Destiny developer Bungie has announced it is letting go of 220 employees, or 17% of its workforce. CEO Pete Parsons said the eliminations were due to "financial challenges," which isn't going down well, especially after it was discovered he may have spent over $2.4 million on classic cars after Sony acquired the company, and continued buying them even after the previous layoffs.
Bungie blames the job eliminations on "rising costs of development and industry shifts as well as enduring economic conditions." The Sony subsidiary says it needs to make substantial changes to its cost structure and focus development efforts entirely on Destiny and Marathon.
The cuts will impact every level of the company, including executives and senior leader roles – but not Parsons, obviously.
It was only in October 2023 that Bungie made its last round of layoffs, and the news comes just under two months since the launch of Destiny 2: The Final Shape, which has been well-received.
In December, Bungie devs told IGN that the atmosphere at the company was "soul-crushing" due to fears of more layoffs, extra cost-cutting measures, and a loss of all independence from Sony if Bungie's financials did not improve. Staff said earlier this year that they feared more job cuts were coming.
The latest layoffs have led to many angry posts on social media from current and former Bungie employees. Destiny 2's global community lead Dylan Gafner (AKA dmg04) called the move "inexcusable," and noted that it's a case of "Accountability falling upon the workers who have pushed the needle to deliver for our community time and time again."
What's angering people even further is the discovery of what seems to be Parsons' account on a car bidding site called Bring a Trailer. It shows he has spent $2.4 million on classic cars since September 2022, which includes $500,000 since the October layoffs.
It would also be another thing is this was a "hero" CEO.
But... what has Bungie done that's interesting besides Destiny? Was his plan was to just keep doing that?
Destiny was supposed to be their “forever” game, the problem is that after 2 dozen expansions:
Live service games just won’t last forever like they want them to.
I'm fine with content being vaulted to make room for new content. What I have an issue with is when the new content isn't even half of the quality of what they removed. I quit playing shortly after menagerie was removed for exactly that reason.
I exited with a "lol no" when I saw the state of lightfall. So glad I did.
It's still a shame for the devs. Quite talented people, it's once again a case of major management fuck up and devs paying the bill...
Workers pay the price for mistakes made by the C-Suite.
not to mention their response to accounts hacked is "lol get fucked" they /might/ give you access but they refuse to do any rollbacks or anything even if it isn't your fault. Shitty company with shitty practices. Was destined to fail eventually.
They do have a pretty sound reasoning for that though. Recoveries (which are services where someone better at the game than you logs into your account to play on your behalf) are a big thing in games like D2, and are also against their ToS. The tl;dr is that if you give your account information to someone and they play your game, and just so happen to cheat, that's your fault for giving your information away.
Precisely.
Developing one MMO forever is not a great strategy, and I'd argue they aren't executing it like the Warframe devs (which is its direct competitor I guess).