Bungie – like a number of other Sony first-party studios recently – has been hit by a wave of layoffs, as the Japanese giant seeks to streamline its business. Despite registering record revenues, the platform holder has been aggressively cutting jobs this year – a trend, which, to be fair, has been consistent across the entire tech sector in 2023.
In response to the job losses, CEO Pete Parsons has taken to Twitter to heap praise on all those now seeking new employment. “Today is a sad day at Bungie as we say goodbye to colleagues who have all made a significant impact on our studio,” he wrote. “What these exceptional individuals have contributed to our games and Bungie culture has been enormous and will continue to be a part of Bungie long into the future.”
He signed off with a recommendation to rival studios to consider hiring any affected individuals: “These are truly talented people. If you have openings, I would highly recommend each and every one of them.”
Of course, the message has not gone down well, with one user scathingly pointing out: “Your senior social lead probably would have recommended against this post, which you would have known had you not let them go. Pity.”
In addition to the layoffs, Bungie has also delayed Destiny 2’s upcoming expansion The Final Shape and reportedly pushed back its rebooted live service FPS, Marathon. Considering Sony stumped up a cool $3.6 billion on the developer to bolster its live service output, this is not exactly a good look, is it? Of course, our thoughts first and foremost are with all those who’ve lost their jobs.
[source twitter.com]
Comments 43
Oh please! Remember, no dialogue better than bad dialogue.
Pete Parsons, yours is the worst.
@PSme He doesn't have to worry. His job is secure.
Hey Sony! How about, instead of laying people off, you divert them from this GaaS rubbish and set up a virtual studio to make games to replace Elder Scrolls and Fallout? Just an idea to keep your fan base happy. Not one founded on maximising short term profit…
So despite all the brags about hardware sales, this is the result.
Nintendo employees help them make great games and massive profits > increases pay across the board. There's a reason they are so successful in the long term and continue to put out games of such high quality. All with games that still cost under £50 new. Just saying.
Nintendo aren't saints, and admittedly their stance on unions and contract workers is shady, but at least they mostly realise that the people they employ and their customers are human beings and not simply resources to milk and exploit.
@MidnightDragonDX yeah. For now.
I am sorry for those that lost their job, but I can't say I'm surprised that Bungie is losing money. I bought Destiny when it came out and have never forgiven it for being one of the most boringly repetitive and irritating games ever and did nobody in the development team think that different planets of the solar system have wildly different gravity and perhaps that fact should influence the jumping that was so integral to navigation. The PVP was so riddled with cheats that it was pointless to try and compete in. The requirement for teams to be formed outside of the game for raids was clique forming and very excluding. Then when you finally ground your way through hours of doing the same missions over and over in the hope of getting the best gear to drop; guess what, they bring out a new iteration and all that amazing gear you got is suddenly a load of poop, and you have to start all over again. Needless to say they never got another penny of my hard earned money!
@DixyViking that kind of how an rpg works new expansions. Old gear become obsolete. Hell even normal rpgs when you go to a new town you have to buy new weapons and armour personally I haven't been a fan of xestiny since they changed the game model to focus in a battlepass. Grinding over and over to get points. Also a large amount players left it . Especially after spending 300+ for expansions and then bungie gave the gsme away for free, left a bad taste in my mouth . Almost as bad as activision.. not surprising they are losing money. Now Sony using bungie as an example of live service - they are one of the worst examples . I think they made a mistake in buying bungie. Final fantasy 14 / swuare enix would have been a better choice
@thefourfoldroot1 the layoffs and cancellations make me think that the GaaS idea won't ever pan out. PS5 is selling like hotcakes based on classic single player Playstation titles rather than the promise of a Fortnite competitor; whilst the layoffs are a shame they are also probably cuts of an overhiring of staff for projects that no longer exist.
And that £3.5bn was the money needed to stop Microsoft buying Bungie and getting them to rebuild Halo. I'm not for consolidation practices but let's not pretend Sony aren't as underhanded as Microsoft in all this.
@thefourfoldroot1 Couldn't agree more. There is a vacuum and they seemingly have no care to fill it
It's funny how people like to talk sh*t but they don't seem to remember more than 1 billion of the acquisition was for Bungie to divide among the employees as an incentive.and that of course includes the guy who made this tweet.
It's also funny that this "news" implies "no one has been safe" all year when teams that have met expectations weren't touched all year. Big companies will never be the good guys but let's not pretend that Destiny 2 hasn't been a bad product since its release, with bad decisions over bad decisions way before the acquisition. The fanbase is feed up at this point and when that happens the money sooner or later stops coming.
Pay 3.6 Billion for a one hit wonder developer
1st Move: Lay talent off
I still have no damn idea why Sony would by Bungie !?!??!??!?! MS does, and always will, own the Halo franchise/rights/name, Bungie left under that agreement.
Destiny was, in reality, just a reskinned Halo.
Bungie to Sony, is Rareware to MS......A colossal clusterfudge that will amount to nothing!
@TrickyDicky99 Herman Hulst dosn't have any power over bungie because bungie works under sie not under playstation
@Kriandis Destiny made 500 million on release day, was the most pre ordered game of all time at the moment. Doesn't really matter if you think it's just halo 2.0, Bungie can make a lot of money.
@TrickyDicky99 it's easy to speculate bad news over a company that has lost money so that doesn't tell much lol. You talked about two specific people in charge being responsible and only one of them was actually in charge.
I work in the IT in middle Europe and I've never ever seen one single developer laid off in 25 years or career, nor I ever heard of one laid off by the multiple friends and ex-colleagues working in the field.
Firing a talentend developer is a desperation move, before you find another one you can trust, train him and make him integral part of the team you've to invest a LOT of money (and maybe he leaves afterwards).
@RadioHedgeFund Nope. According to rumors, Bungie was willing to sell to Microsoft for less then Sony bough them, but dealbreaker for Microsoft was fact that Bungie has requested too much autonomy and Microsoft did not liked it.
And when Microsoft went heels deep into ABK stuff, it was clear that they would not buy Bungie.
@Old-Red Nintendo isnt a saint that for sure they outsource a lot thats why you can say we don't terminate people.
What’s most interesting to me now is the ‘’’Centre of Excellence’ that was supposed to be run by Bungie when it came to Live Service titles. Surely the fact that Bungie can’t get their own house in order wont give them much weight or leverage behind their own opinions on other studios working on GaaS. With the rumours building that Sony are pulling back on pay to play titles because of the internal backlash from massively talented single player developers, Bungie just doesn’t feel like a very good fit to Sonys Worldwide Studios anymore at all. Even though Bungie have a degree of independence, being purchased for Billions will give Sony SOME say in proceedings surely.. After fans uproar to Suicide Squad, a game that Sony seemed to want everyone to think was a game from them after the huge state of play reveal and everyone in their right minds hating FairGame$, plus Spider-Man 2 doing awesome numbers, it has to be in Sonys best interests to see what fans really want and going down the GaaS route is a very bad idea. The people that were most up for making as many live service games are slowly being pushed out of SIE, I wonder how long Herman has left. Instead of paying for Bungie, Firesprite and Haven Studios, 2 of which hadn’t even released a game, money would have been way better spent on CD Projekt Red and Remedy and in my own opinion, those developers would have been a perfect fit with the existing studios in Sonys Portfolio and kept the single player, story driven ethos that makes PlayStation the place I want to play my games!
@TrickyDicky99 I don't know if you fire everyone you don't like is a good way to go. What did Bungie produce so far besides the Destiny 2 stuff so far?
The monetization got worse and worse of time so it was not just ABK i would love to hear what they are releasing in the near future. You can't always let a company go unchecked without any results.
Second they got a great payday for the acquisition if they think the workers are so talented why didn't they do more to keep them on board? I'm certain the people in top didn't lose any pay.
@Godot25 who told you that whopper then or do you have an uncle what works for microsoft?
I wish everyone the best of luck moving forward. Losing your job just before the holiday season sucks. Hopefully most land a cushy new job asap
While Sony did recently announce record revenue (as the article points out) their total profit was actually down. The devil is always in the detail.
They even reported in their last financial statement that they predict the PlayStation business profit to deteriorate due to promotions etc (The recent sale price of the PS5 and not raising the price in the USA are 2 recent examples that spring to mind)
"Sony expects profitability for its latest console to deteriorate in the full year due to changes in promotions in certain geographic regions."
While I strongly disagree with them doing it, I imagine this is a knock on effect of that and the writing has been on the wall for some cost savings.
@ROTTIEMAN16 Nope. There was a talk about Bungie purchase by Microsoft for much of 2020 and 2021. That's why was kinda surprising when Sony announced that they are buying Bungie.
It was such a "talk" that even Bungie CEO had to comment on them. He said that they are not in talk with anybody about acquisition. Which proved to be ***** because they sell to Sony few weeks later.
And even Microsoft internal documents had Bungie on the "shortlist" of what to buy.
@Old-Red nintendo uses contractors and treats them like crap (referred to as "red badges" by full time employees and even "the dating pool" according to a sexual harassment complaint). To avoid labor laws they run 10 month cycles and have 2 month breaks without pay. This way they dont need to pay for their benefits like a full time employee.
Female contractors have complained about a large number of sexual harassment incidents and claimed they are stalked by some full time employees. They even alleged that female hires are warned to keep their distance from certain senior employees.
One contractor complained to the media that they were told if they went to their grandpa's funeral they would no longer have a job.
https://www.gamespot.com/articles/new-report-alleges-nintendos-female-contractors-faced-sexual-harassment/1100-6506583/
https://www.axios.com/2022/05/12/nintendo-contractors-investigation
it's not like they're laying off ALL of them. These things happen all the time
Probably using his paycheck to wipe his tears away.
@Godot25 so nothing about buying them cheaper or microsoft wanting more control plus who was talking?people online?Well that means nothing and is just conjecture
Did the CEO say how much of a pay cut he was taking for doing such a poor job, his only job, running the company? I’d say pay cut should equal at least the % of workforce fired. Less employees he has less work he has to do so it seems fair.🤷🏻♂️
There is no doubt about it: In terms of returns on investment, which is clearly all Sony cares about anymore,... Buying bungie was a massive mistake that will likely never give them the bags of money through predation they had hoped for.
Make no mistake, every sterile schill at the top of Sony corpo ladder above above the Jim Ryan's and such all signed off on their failed trajectory. They are all to blame for their current predicament and public sentiment, and most of the top Sony brass and shareholders that originally signed off on this mess, are still in their current roles.
If they are so good, why not keep them? Need some more change on the shareholders pockets huh?
Hope you don't come to regret it.
Better to delay The Final Shape and Marathon than push them out when they are not ready. I have no doubts that both will be massive and set record numbers for Bungie when they release.
For me, the bad news coming from SONY has been somewhat consistent in the past few years. But all the sector are laying off across the board. Delays have been coming for the last few years too. As if the market is saturated right now. As if the strategy is to dripfeed titles to secure maximum engagement short and long term.
these people are being let go because jim mismanaged all of sony's interneal studios with gaas schlock that (mostly) nobody wants to touch. inefficient game development like this results in people losing their jobs. playstation is/was heading towards a cliff but thankfully some people at the top recognized this and removed jim relatively early in his reign. the brand may yet be saved with smart decisions, hard work and a major coarse correction. might have to endure a few bad years until then, though.
@TrickyDicky99 How do u know that?
@DixyViking That's not even the worst part. What irks me the most is the rng for raid or dungeon exotic weapons. I've spoken with players who had to run raids over 60 times just for the weapon to drop. It's bad enough trying to find people willing to spend a couple of hours on the raid and then forcing players to run it so many times is so predatory it should be illegal especially since all raids and dungeons are paid content. it would be different if they're doing runs to get better stats on the weapon but for fixed stats it's a disgusting mechanic.
Maybe just maybe one day these independent studios will learn to stay independent!! Stop letting cooperation buy you! Yes both sony and Microsoft! This happens everytime they buy them then in order to shave the fat from the billion or million dollar studio they cut the employees of their newly owned studio they bought. Just wait for it! It's coming for Activision too. They have to start trying to get some of those billions back from the purchase.
I'm just said Luke Smith wasn't fired.
@thefourfoldroot1 i guess you missed this part ," the decision to terminate staff was made directly by Bungie management rather than Sony".
@Nem because thats the reality of running a company , many companies across the country had to lay people off. if a department is bloated you have to trim the fat. no one enjoys laying off people , its a sad part of life. but at the end of the day , its something you need to have done.
@twitchtvpat
I don’t think you can say I missed it when it isn’t in the article. And when this piece starts by saying the platform holder has been laying many people off recently, which is very misleading if what you say is actually true. If so that’s quite interesting though.
@TrickyDicky99 like u said where there is smoke there is fire but u also said there only rumors
He should have kept his mouth shut especially then say if anyone can take them on he's recommended it.
Managers should have been sacked because of their decision have lead to this
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