Bungie announced layoffs affecting 220 employees. blog postBungie CEO Pete Parsons cites “rising development costs and industry changes, as well as ongoing economic conditions” as a major factor, while also revealing some drastic changes facing the company in the future.
These layoffs represent 17 percent of the studio’s workforce and affect every department in the company, with management and executive roles taking the biggest hit. Parsons states that departing employees will receive a “generous” departure package that includes severance, bonus, and health insurance. Bungie also plans to hold employee town halls, as well as team and individual meetings in the coming weeks to facilitate determine next steps. The company remains at 850 employees following the layoffs.
“I realize this is all difficult news, especially after the success we had with The Final Shape,” Parsons writes. “However, as we navigated the broader economic realities of the past year, and after exhausting all other mitigation options, this became a necessary decision to refocus our studio and our business on more realistic goals and financially viable outcomes.”
Parsons also reveals plans to further integrate Bungie with Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE), which acquired the studio in 2022, to play to its strengths. First, Bungie is working to integrate 155 roles (12 percent of its staff) into SIE over the next few quarters. Bungie says this has allowed it to save additional talent that would otherwise have been affected by today’s layoffs.
Second, Bungie is partnering with PlayStation Studios to create a recent, separate internal studio that will continue developing one of its incubator projects. Bungie describes the title as “an action game set in an all-new sci-fi universe.”
Parsons then explains how Bungie got into this tough situation. He explains that the team’s goal was to ship games in “three enduring, global franchises” and created several incubator projects to achieve that goal. However, Bungie found itself in a tough situation too quickly. This forced its support structure to grow beyond what it could sustain, especially with two major titles in development underway in Destiny 2 and the upcoming Marathon.
Destiny 2: Final Form
Parsons also mentions that this rapid expansion ran afoul of the broader economic downturn, a piercing decline in the gaming industry, mixed reception to Destiny 2: Lightfall, and the need to give Destiny 2’s recently released The Final Shape expansion (which received critical acclaim) and Marathon more development time to ensure high quality. “We were overly ambitious, our financial safety margins were then exceeded, and we were operating in the red,” Parsons states.
“Once this new trajectory became clear, we knew we had to change course and speed, and we did everything we could to avoid today’s outcome,” Parsons writes. “Even with exhaustive efforts by our leadership and product teams to address our financial challenges, those steps simply weren’t enough.”
Today’s layoffs come roughly eight months after the studio laid off 100 employees last October, and the second time since being acquired by Sony. They’re the latest in a wave of layoffs in the gaming industry that have been ongoing since last year, and will hopefully get the affected employees back on their feet sooner rather than later.
