As a Destiny 2 player on a break after binging The Final Shape and dipping into Episode 1: Echoes, it was fun while it lasted. Not the game, mind you – it’s still one of the best live-service looter shooters out there, if not the best. It’s the general feeling that things were looking up for Bungie, the sun will rise tomorrow, etc.
CEO Pete Parsons recently announced that the developer was eliminating 220 roles – a 17 percent reduction to its workforce. However, 155 roles, about 12 percent of the studio, are also being integrated into PlayStation. The latter may seem like silver linings, but the process will take multiple quarters.
A new studio is also being formed to work on one of Bungie’s incubation projects, touted as having a brand new sci-fi universe (hopefully not another PvP shooter like Concord). Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier reported that 40 employees are moving to this new studio. As a result, a studio of over 1300 has dropped to 850. Still fairly sizable, for sure, but tell that to those who lost entire teams, much less those who didn’t get lucky and have lost their jobs.
What happened? Parsons explained that developers became stretched too thin with all its incubation projects. It thus scaled higher to compensate, but like many others, the company was affected by the “broad economic slowdown” and “a sharp downturn in the games industry” in 2023. It also failed to deliver with Lightfall, a pivotal moment.
Couple that with delays to Marathon and The Final Shape – which costs money, let’s be real – and eventually, the studio “exceeded” its safety margins. “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 not enough,” said Parsons, resulting in the current layoffs.
You’ll probably remember that Bungie laid off staff last year, owing once again to issues with Lightfall (also subsequently poisoning the well for any future stories presented in seasons leading up to The Final Shape, as indicated in player counts). However, as always, there’s more to the story.
Game File’s Stephen Totilo spoke to anonymous sources (including those who worked at the studio), reporting that Bungie has been losing money since Lightfall’s launch. Not only is it consistently missing targets set by Sony, but one source feels the leadership may have “sold things they were just not able to deliver.” While the last round of layoffs was for Bungie to show how serious it was in correcting the ship, they were reportedly not enough – the most recent had already been planned earlier this year. The Final Shape allegedly sold through less than Lightfall, but the result was seemingly already decided.
It’s thus less of a matter of whether the expansion – the end of a ten-year-long saga, where it’s guaranteed that a large chunk of players would jump ship after everything – performed well critically or commercially; whether the enthusiasm and support of fans actually meant anything to Bungie’s bottom line. Instead, it’s the ramifications of leadership, once again, that utterly failed its developers working tirelessly to deliver an exceptional experience.
Given how consistently its executives have been missing, you would wonder if this would lead to any change in leadership, such as firing Parsons. That apparently won’t be necessary right now because, as Giant Bomb’s Jeff Grubb reports, Sony Interactive Entertainment joint CEO Hermen Hulst, also president and CEO of PlayStation Studios, allegedly runs Bungie. The studio will reportedly “lose its autonomy and will become like any other PlayStation Worldwide Studios under SIE and Hermen Hulst,” said Grubb, also noting that the process is already happening.
What shape the studio will take in the future remains to be seen, especially with Sony shifting course on its previously big live service plans. However, past and present employees speaking to Totilo believe that not selling to the publisher wouldn’t have been ideal either. One even went as far as to say “The alternate history is insolvency.”
What about the rumored Destiny 3, codenamed Payback? In the latest Game Mess Mornings episode, Grubb said that this experience, considered the “next Destiny,” has been shelved “indefinitely.” Internally, it wasn’t called Destiny 3; Schreier would then report that it was a “spinoff project” cancelled a “while ago” and the developer did some “very early work on it.” The cancellation reportedly happened before the layoffs.
All of this feeds back into the current approach for Bungie, which is devoting all resources to Destiny 2 and Marathon. The latter is still allegedly coming in 2025. There are no changes or disruptions to the current roadmap for Destiny 2 this year or beyond, which means
Codename Frontiers – whatever it may be – is still happening. However, Grubb reported there will be “lighter” and “smaller” content drops for the game known as content packs. “When it comes to Destiny 2, the expectation internally is that the future content will be lighter, smaller, to take less time than what The Final Shape did, and require fewer people.” This doesn’t completely discount epic expansions, but they may be much less frequent.
For whatever it’s worth, a former employee revealed that a new raid was in the works and “looking really good.” How that will mesh with the current content plan or whatever Bungie is cooking up in the future remains to be seen.
As a fan of the franchise, one who wants to support the studio despite management’s decisions, it’s hard not to feel bummed out by all this. The fact that several developers responsible for some of the best memories I’ve made with the franchise over the past few months are gone just outright sucks. There are also bigger worries over the studio’s plans for the future and these reported “content packs.”
Leave aside whether the studio will consistently hit the same quality benchmarks with its environments, story-telling, activities, visuals, music, weapons, and so much more. Fans are already mixed about the whole Episodic approach, which isn’t all that different from the seasonal format that Bungie abandoned. With big expansions de-emphasized, that’s one less revenue stream and another opportunity to get new players into the franchise, leading to further stagnation.
While I don’t think Destiny 2 will be abandoned outright any time soon – because it’s the only game earning Bungie any money right now – all these events paint a grim picture of the future. Why should anyone looking at all of this be excited for Marathon?
One could argue that it will set a benchmark for the extraction shooter genre, but that has its own challenges in a market quickly becoming stuffed with competitors. Between its delays, Christopher Barrett no longer directing (allegedly) and a reported shift towards playable heroes, it could also end up as another mess for the studio, further compounding its financial failures.
Maybe there’s some hope, and Bungie could make a comeback, but many believed that would happen with The Final Shape. Whether it’s due to bad leadership, economic downturns, etc, the franchise is entering a dark time. For all the triumphs and catharsis that the expansion provided to hundreds of thousands, potentially millions of fans in-game, the industry has proven once again that reality can often be disappointing.
Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, GamingBolt as an organization.
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