Bungie has announced another round of layoffs, affecting 220 employees.
The news broke in a new blog post from Bungie CEO Pete Parsons, who wrote that due to “rising costs of development and industry shifts”, as well as “enduring economic conditions”, the Destiny 2 studio has made the decision to make substantial changes to its cost structure and “focus development efforts entirely on Destiny and Marathon . ”
This decision means that 220 development roles have been eliminated, representation 17% of Bungie’s workforce, affecting every level of the company, including executive and senior leader roles. This comes less than one year after the studio cut an unknown number of jobs .
“Today is a difficult and painful day, especially for our departing colleagues, all of which have made important and valuable contributions to Bungie,” Parsons said. “Our goal is to support them with the utmost care and respect. For everyone affected by this job reduction, we will be offering a generous exit package, including severance, bonus and health coverage.”
Later, Parsons said that this will be a “challenging time” for Bungie and confirms that it still has over 850 team members building Destiny and Marathon .
In addition, Parsons explained that Bungie will be deepening its integration with Sony Interactive Entertainment – who bought the studio in February 2022 – by moving 155 employees – roughly 12% of the workforce – over to the publisher over the next few quarters.
“SIE has worked tirelessly with us to identify roles for as many of our people as possible, enabling us together to save a great deal of talent that would otherwise have been affected by the reduction in force,” the CEO explained.
Parsons also took this time to announced that Bungie will be moving one of its projects – a brand-new action game set in a sci-fi fantasy universe – to PlayStation Studios to form a new studio.
The layoffs come less than two months after the launch of Destiny 2 ‘s The Final Shape expansion, which has proved to be the game’s most successful downloadable content (DLC) to date.
Parsons acknowledged this, saying, “I realise all of this is hard news, especially following the success we have seen with The Final Shape . But as we’ve navigated the broader economic realities over the last year, and after exhausting all other mitigation options, this has become a necessary decision to refocus our studio and our business with more realistic goals and viable financials.”
The post continues, with Parsons explaining that for the past five years, Bungie has worked to release games across “three enduring, global franchises” and to realize this, has set up “several incubation projects, each seeded with senior development leaders from our existing teams.”
However, this model has “stretched our talent too thin, too quickly”, and has “forced our studio support structures to scale to a larger level than we could realistically support, given our two primary products in development – Destiny and Marathon . ”
“We were overly ambitious, our financial safety margins were subsequently exceeded, and we began running in the red,” Parsons added. “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.”
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