As the industry continues to cut jobs, Bungie, developer of Destiny 2 and semi-recently acquired PlayStation studio, is the latest to suffer layoffs.
Community Manager and Co-Lead of Accessibility Liana Ruppert, Social Media Lead Griffin Bennett, Recruiting Coordinator Dylan Wen, Franchise Editor Jason Guisao, and Icon Artist John Zelman have confirmed that they have been let go.
Unfortunately, it appears they aren’t the only ones, but the full scale of the cuts has not been announced, for the moment.
A report from Bloomberg adds more information alleging that the upcoming Destiny 2 expansion The Final Shape has been delayed from its February 27, 2024 release date to June. On the other hand, the brand-new PvP shooter Marathon has been delayed to 2025.
At the moment, Bungie has not posted anything official about either the delays of the layoffs, but we have reached out to our contacts at the studio and we’ll update this post if we hear anything relevant in return.
This comes among a wave of layoffs that affected many studios across the industry including Sony’s own Media Molecule and Naughty Dog, Frontier, Embracer Group, Team17, Epic Games, and Microsoft.
Bungie’s upcoming game Marathon was one of the most interesting reveals at the PlayStation Showcase hosted in May, resurrecting a piece of the studio’s own history. As a sci-fi PvP extraction shooter, it certainly turned quite a few heads.
It’s also part of an initiative by Sony aimed to grow a number of Games as a Service within its PlayStation Studios and jump on the profitable GAAS bandwagon.
That initiative has been mentioned as one of the main reasons for PlayStation’s acquisition of Bungie announced in 2022, with the intention of using the developer’s know-how to support other internal studios in their endeavors to create their own GAAS.
At the moment, the state of the project is unknown, but we’re possibly going to hear more from Sony itself as it announces its financial results early next months.
