Destiny 2 and Marathon developer Bungie has announced layoffs to the tune of over 200 employees as part of what studio head Pete Parsons calls a “new path” for the company.
According to an announcement made on the Bungie website earlier today, 220 Bungie staffers, or around 17% of the studio’s total workforce, will be let go due to “rising costs of development and industry shifts as well as enduring economic conditions”.
Parsons says that despite the success of Destiny 2‘s latest expansion The Final Shape (of which May’s major leak was presumably not a part), the decision to lay off hundreds of employees was “necessary” in order to move towards “more realistic goals and viable financials”.
As well as 220 employees being let go, around 155 staffers from Bungie are being integrated into Sony, which Parsons says will enable his studio to “save a great deal of talent” that would otherwise have been let go.
Additionally, although Bungie has seemingly canceled a number of what it calls “incubation projects”, one such in-development project, an “action game set in a brand-new science-fantasy universe”, will be spun off as a new game to be developed by a newly-created internal PlayStation studio. This project may or may not be the light-hearted action game revealed by Bungie last year.
These “incubation projects” were, according to Parsons, attempts to expand its work to ship games in “three enduring, global franchises”. They would have been headed up by senior execs from existing Bungie teams, but over the course of the last 18 months or so, Bungie leadership realized the incubation project model would “stretch [its] talent too thin, too quickly”.
Parsons says that Bungie became “overly ambitious” during this period, and that it was “running in the red”. The studio head goes on to say that Bungie did everything it could to “avoid today’s outcome”, but that it was unable to do so.
Parsons says that Bungie still has more than 850 staffers working on Destiny and Marathon-related projects, and that it will share more information about its upcoming projects in the future.
This isn’t the first round of Bungie layoffs within the last 12 months. Back in October, the studio reportedly laid off around 100 employees following poor sales of the Lightfall expansion. Additionally, in February, Bungie’s parent company Sony let around 900 employees from various studios go, although Bungie seemingly wasn’t among them.
We’ll have to wait and see what Bungie has in store for the future, but for now, more than 200 of its employees find themselves without a job. Stay tuned for more.
