Destiny 2 developer Bungie has announced plans to lay off 220 employees, integrating the remaining 155 positions into Sony Interactive Entertainment and moving work on one of its “incubation projects” to the newly formed PlayStation Studio.
Bungie CEO Pete Parsons laid out the shift in a new blog post, calling it “the hardest change our studio has ever made.” He continued: “Due to rising development costs, industry shifts, and ongoing economic conditions, it became clear that we needed to make significant changes to our cost structure and focus development efforts solely on Destiny and Marathon.”
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The 220 employees being laid off represent “approximately 17%” of the studio’s total workforce, and Parsons said the layoffs include “executive and senior leadership.” He added: “Today is a difficult and painful day, especially for colleagues who are leaving, all of whom have made important and valuable contributions to Bungie. Our goal is to support them with the utmost care and respect. For all employees affected by the layoffs, we will provide generous severance packages, including severance pay, bonuses, and health insurance.”
In addition, Bungie will be more deeply integrated with parent company Sony, and the studio is currently “working to integrate 155 [its] Over the next few quarters, Bungie will transition approximately 12% of its positions to SIE,” Parsons said, a move that will allow Bungie to “save a significant amount of talent that would otherwise be impacted by layoffs.”
Finally, Bungie is set to “spin off” development of one of its “incubation projects,” an unnamed action game set in a new sci-fi universe, to the newly formed PlayStation Studio, and Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier has said that 75 former Bungie employees will head to the new studio.
Overall, Bungie will reduce its headcount from 1,300 to 850 as a result of these changes. “For more than five years, our goal has been to launch three enduring, global games,” Parsons wrote. “To achieve this, we have established several incubation projects, each led by a senior development leader from one of our existing teams. We ultimately realized that this model was spreading our talent too thin, too fast. It also forced our studio support structure to expand to a level we couldn’t realistically support, given the two major products we were developing – Destiny and Marathon.”
“In addition, in 2023, our rapid expansion was met with a broad economic slowdown, a sharp decline in the gaming industry, the poor quality of Destiny 2: Lightfall, and the need to give Final Form and Marathon adequate time to ensure that both projects achieved the quality that players expected and deserved. We were overambitious, our financial safety margin was subsequently exceeded, and we began to go into the red.
“Once our new trajectory became clear, we knew we had to change direction and pace, and we did everything we could to avoid today’s outcome. Even with the best efforts of our leadership and product teams to address the financial challenges, those actions were not enough.”
