Destiny 2 developer Bungie lays off 17% of its workforce

Destiny 2 developer Bungie has announced that 220 roles within the organisation, or about 17% of the company’s workforce, are being eliminated following the recent release of the game’s latest expansion, The Final Shape. This new round of job cuts comes less than a year after 8% of staff at the company were laid off  in October 2023.

“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 focus development efforts entirely on Destiny and Marathon“, writes Bungie CEO Pete Parsons in a blog post entitled The New Path for Bungie. “Today is a difficult and painful day, especially for our departing colleagues, all of which have made important and valuable contributions to Bungie.”

This morning, we shared an important update with the Bungie team on the difficult decision to eliminate 220 roles at Bungie.

You can read the full statement below.https://t.co/FVkWNSWDtZ

— Bungie (@Bungie) July 31, 2024

Despite the post stating that Bungie’s goal is to “is to support [its employees] with the utmost care and respect“, the general tone of many of the responses to the studio’s post on X regarding the layoffs, particularly from affected employees, has been a lack of substantial warning that the job cuts were incoming, with a former Sound Designer, Tzvi Sherman, posting “this is how I’ve found out I’m laid off” in a reply to the announcement. The fact that these layoffs come only a month following the release of Destiny 2: The Final Shape, one of the game’s best-reviewed expansions in years, also doesn’t help demonstrate why the job cuts were necessary.

In the blog post announcing the cuts, Parsons details two other major changes at Bungie going forward. The first of these is a deepening of the integration between the studio and Sony, which acquired Bungie back in 2022. This will involve integrating 155 of the studio’s roles (representing about 12% of the company), into Sony Interactive Entertainment over the next few quarters. The second major change that Bungie will be implementing is that the company will be working with Sony to expand one of its “incubation projects“, which is described as “an action game set in a brand-new science-fantasy universe” into a full game, to be developed by a new studio within PlayStation Studios. This is seemingly not the Marathon multiplayer game which was announced last year and is still in development.

The video game industry has been no stranger to layoffs in recent years, with a combination of economic pressures and studio over-hiring during the pandemic years leading to waves of job losses across studios big and small. These cuts at Bungie, Sony’s most high-profile developer specialising in live-service multiplayer titles, has happened not long before the release of Concord, another live-service title developed by Sony-owned Firewalk Studios. With Concord facing an uncertain future following the mixed reception to its reveal trailer and subsequent closed beta, these job cuts may suggest Sony is rethinking its investments in live-service gaming. Sony itself laid off about 8% of its global workforce earlier this year.

Bungie has confirmed that it will be offering a generous exit package to affected employees. Hopefully those impacted by the job cuts are able to find new positions before long.