Bungie to Lay Off 220 Workers, Will Be Further Integrated into Sony

#SackBungieLeadership

Hostile Takeover?

I'm curious what the 3rd game is that's getting spun out into Playstation Studios as well and I wonder when we'll find out the name of this new studio.

Yeesh, they’re just being bashed from owner to owner, getting stripped away more each time.

I’ve been saying it since day one, this acquisition was a mistake for both parties and Sony overpaid for them, they have lots of talent yes, but also a very poor leadership so maybe Sony taking over will be better but I’m skeptical.

They signed the contract which had performance targets, that if not met would mean Sony taking more control.

Quite intrigued in what this new studio will be and what they are working on.

@WhiteRabbit - Yes, if they didn't reached some milestones ($), Sony would have the right to take control, what probably happened. It makes sense that Sony's first step was to reduce the company's workforce, Bungie had more employees than Naughty Dog, Santa Monica and Sucker Punch combined.

And quite interesting that they are forming a new studio, Sony still has two more "secret" studios that have not been formally announced (one in San Diego and the other formed by Jason Blundell)

For many, Bungie haven't released a game they've wanted to play for almost 15 years.

Sony should never have wasted all that money on them. So many poor decisions were made during Ryan's tenure.

Shame for those losing their jobs. Nobody deserves it.

Fully expecting Sony to raise PSplus prices soon.

And yet CEO Pete Parsons is still there, stinking up the place like a rotten corpse leading them from one disaster thats somehow worse than the last. I feel for everyone who has undeservedly lost their jobs while the worst of them remain in power and with a massive salary.

Was it $3 billion they paid? Then included a bunch of retention bonuses, and now just laying off a huge chunk of the team? Man, that didn’t pan out.

It would be interesting to see how this affects morale at bungee. The layoffs obviously hurt morale but also losing that independence. The studio is already a shell of what it used to be but I wouldn't be surprised if some of the remaining employees aren't looking at other job postings where they are available. Seems like a lose lose for all involved.

Sony: ASSUMING DIRECT CONTROL.

Dang, to think that the original creators of Halo are ending up like this. It's actually sad.

“ Bungie to Layoff 220 Employees, Will Be Further Integrated into Sony “

I’m a little confused, are some of the 220 in the title being integrated into Sony, or are those 220 gone and the additional 155 mentioned in the article moving over to Sony? If it’s the latter perhaps the title forgot the 155 and should have read:

“Bungie to Layoff 220 Employees, an Additional 155 Will Be Further Integrated into Sony” 🤷🏻‍♂️

Edit: Ok after reading over the title an additional half dozen times I suppose everything after the comma , is referring to Bingie being integrated into Sony, not any of the 220.

“Bungie to Layoff 220 Employees, Developer Will Be Further Integrated into Sony”

@UltimateOtaku91 Part of me feels like Sony knew Bungie wasn't going to meet those targets and fully planned to absorb the talent for exclusive content.

My guess is Bungie won't last 10 years.

I hope the new studio that's forming isn't for a live service title

@ED_209 interesting stuff, one is probably a COD like game and the other a new uncharted. Really hope the Bungie transferred game is not a live service.

I said the moment it happened that Sony buying Bungie was one of the biggest wastes of money and stupidist decisions they ever made. 3 bill for this what a waste

@PsBoxSwitchOwner There are plenty of people out there that deserve to lose their jobs. I understand what you mean, it's sad when people lose their jobs unexpectedly, but it doesn't mean that some of those people weren't already bad employees who took their positions for granted. If they're great, I would think Bungie will try to retain them and not lose them.

Oy @LiamCroft, "layoff" is a noun. "lay off" is the verb that belongs in this headline.

Yikes. I think those of us who thought the deal was a terrible one are constantly proven right. Wish were were wrong, though.

Spread to thinly amongst projects is the key word for me.
A lot of studios do this and then end producing nothing or games of little value.
I do worry there is to much of this spread thinly going on and is why games are taking longer in development.
A Sony studio used to be good at making one game per studio, an amazing game and get it finished and done. Maybe not so much nowadays.

Ah yes those vague and always responsible “enduring economic conditions.”

@naruball the deal was bad because as bungie employees already said Bungie made promises they couldn't keep.

What happened last year and what is happening is Bungies fault, the lost money is already lost. The CEO of Sony said they weren't expecting money from Bungie this year lol. So now it depends in how you want to see it, Bungie is the reason why Sony canceled half their services and freed ND and Insomniac, this and concord will only double down the decision of ending the services push that Ryan started. For me that's enough to make it worth it.

It was obvious this would happen, doesn't matter how good the las dlc did they fumbled hard last year and the monetary expectations that Bungie themselves established before acquisition were impossible at this point.
That's why one of their best guys decided to start working directly for sony a couple months ago, everyone knew. The internet is going to be full of idiotic opinions so a break from social media is needed LOL.

Very unfortunate considering Final Shape did very well critically and it seemed commercially. It is the reality of being owned by a larger corporation. They still probably will be fine once they get into this new structure.

On one hand it could be said that once Bungie left Microsoft and went independent, losing the Halo IP, they were on a downward trajectory. However given Micro$oft's track record with studios (including 343) there's no guarantee they would've been better off staying with them either. Sony has been relatively patient, but now I think Bungie will be split into 2 teams. One skeleton crew to continue maintaining/supporting Destiny 2 and the new studio under PS Studios which will create PS exclusives starting with this Sci-Fi game.

Sony is an absolute mess right now.

@SleeplessKnight I forgot they first went from Microsoft to Activision, then independent. So they would still be owned by Microsoft either way if they would've stayed under either one.

Sony and Bungie was never a natural fit and felt like a colossal waste of money.

Yet it sounds like Sony is generally doing right by the studio (albeit its always sad to hear of layoffs).

I don't think this aquisition business where the parent company doesn't properly integrate the subsidary company ever really works so I'm not entirely shocked this is where we got to.

Sony has always taken a coordinated and collaborative approach to its first party studios, yet Bungie was a very clear outlier so I don't see how it could ever really work.

It does sound like this was a Bungie management issue rather than a Sony issue - but it will be interesting to see how things evolve.

@GymratAmarillo silver lining, I guess!

@Frmknst
For the crying love of God YES PLEASE.
They probably aren't though. Knowing Sony they love to disappoint for these past 2 gens for some reason

@SmileMan64
Bungie under Sony management? During the PS3 era I would've said that's amazing news!
Now though... They can't even top Factions, two generations later

Bungie had to downsize one way or another, we got news last year about how bad their management is.

Sony has made a lot of dumb decisions over the last few years, and buying Bungie for $3.6 billion in some panic shopping spree after MS bought Bethesda, was definitely one of them.

Jimbo's decisions are looking worse and worse
His main prize - Bungie, who was supposed to spearhead live service charge is gutted. And probably is not independent anymore
Half of live service project delayed or outright canceled
Years of dev time spent on live service games that will never see light of day (TLOU Factions for example)
Concord seems like DoA

Basically, only success from this whole Jimbo's charade is Helldivers 2. Which is pretty bad if you ask me.

One of the worst acquisitions this gen at least! this was when Jim got the live service panic attack and couldn't control his impulses 😕

Letting Bungie operate independently at the start was a huge mistake. Their crap leadership laid off some of the longest serving employees. Not even the composer was safe. This is a good move on Sony's part, shame it wasn't sooner.

Sad, but not a surprise at all. Buying Bungie was one of the worst moves by Sony (or byJim Ryan).

Man all the restored faith “The Final Shape” seemingly brought to the table and yet still Bungie has to hemmorage workforce. Has there even been any news on how much the expansion actually sold yet?

Deciding to send Destiny 2 content to the Vault or Archive or whatever they called it killed any interest I could have had in the game, and I am sure I am not alone in saying that. I wouldn't jump into a long-running TV show at season 4, I'd want to watch it from the start, and similarly there was no way I'd be jumping into Destiny 2 only to play the latest expansions without the prior context. They should have found a way to keep older seasons available and, who knows, I might have booted up Destiny 2 at some point (thanks PS+ essential for making the base app available anyway).
I hope the Destiny talent is distributed around SIE's other studios sensibly though. Sending some to Firewalk might not be a bad idea, I have a feeling based on playing the beta that Concord is going to need some serious help, and a big 2.0 revamp and associated marketing push, to make any appreciable impact. Good on Sony for trying to save what jobs it can, at least.

Old Jimbo wasted $3 Billion for this useless studio when that money could revive a lot of Sony's dormant IP like Ape Escape, Syphon Filter, Legend of Dragoon, Wild Arms etc while keep Japan + London Studio alive. Heck, i bet there's still plenty of money left that could be used to acquire smaller studios like Arrowhead who did a much better job than Bungie.

Wait a second... The numbers imply that Bungie had around 1,300 staff... that seems insanely bloated - are there any other developers that big?

@StrickenBiged Do you mean like Rockstar, SE, Capcom, Ubisoft, EA, Nintendo, or Bamco which i believe has thousands of employee more than Bungie or indie devs?

@PuppetMaster I mean those publishers also have more than one game they have released. Bungie is out here still working on 1 and making a second game. Apart from say Rockstar which has only released RDR2 in the last few years. 1300 is a lot for a single developer only pumping out content into one game.

Sucks for those who are laid off. But not surprised at all. The heads of Bungie are idiots

@PuppetMaster

The Ryan plan was to scale back the traditional single player first party games, move on from all those boring old retro games and IPs, and then focus on several concurrent live service cash cows to rival the industry's juggernauts.

It underestimated the rise of the Chinese gacha, and gamers' stubbornness to move away from long established titles, while overestimating Sony's ability to actually bring to market an ongoing and engaging product. Helldiver's 2 may be a success, but what of Concord, Fairgames, Marathon and the others they've announced?

@SmileMan64 I feel the same. While many would've said this happened years ago, today feels like the day the team that designed one of the greatest gaming franchises of all time is officially dead.

Bungie is a zombie now, from the sounds of it. And all it'll take is Marathon failing before the Bungie name ceases to exist.

Sure feels like Sony has gotten nothing out of this acquisition. I see a lot of people bemoaning Bungie management, but let's not forget Sony management's hand in all this. They even made it sound like Bungie's autonomy was of importance to them, just for this extreme integration to happen.

Nor should we forget the supposed purpose of this acquisition was live-service expertise. Bungie certainly doesn't seem like experts now, and Concord might singlehandedly showcase how ridiculous of a business model it represents.

This whole thing was a bad move on Sony's part. The only consolation is that this new Bungie-flavored team is working on an actual game.

The ones who will be better off will be at the top in that team who never got touched in the last lot of cuts because the ones lower got cut the music guy etc.

Karma is a b

And it's come right around but they will be paid well with a pension or whatever if they leave. Unlike the ones before who didn't get anything hardly

@jrt87 Helldivers 2 was a success for few months but now it's got stagnant and me and others have moved in to other games for now. But Sony handled that game like ***** as well with the PSN thing and it's now not available in 172/3 countries. They could have also put it on Xbox if they seriously wanted a live service game

@Lonejester yeah like the rest of the world aren’t enduring economic conditions!

@PuppetMaster totally agree it was a shocking purchase but at least Sony got a bargain with insomniac so it evens out slightly!

@MrMagic not really , sony owns them. they bought them. it's not a surprise they are going to fully take it over if they spent that much money on them and its not working out , they needed to take extra steps.

@Godot25 Jim Ryan was involved with the playstation since day one. i'm sure he did a lot more good things then you think.

@pharos_haven From this news it seems they're working not just on Destiny and Marathon but a couple of unannounced projects.

"The CEO also confirms that a new team within PlayStation Studios is being created to continue development of one of Bungie's "incubation projects". Expanding on how Bungie ended up in this situation, Parsons said the studio became stretched too thinly across multiple incubation projects"

@jrt87 It's painful to see people got fired. But i'm just glad Ryan's plan of "PS without traditional single player games" isn't working and he got booted out before he do more damage to SIE. I just can't imagine PS without traditional single player games like GOW, TloU, Ghost of Tsushima, etc etc and only pumping out live service games.

@Dodoo Yes but don't forget Bluepoint and Housemarque. So far, those three are the only good purchase in the last 5 years. Although, we need to wait and see how Firesprite, Firewalk, and Haven Studios gonna do with their new IP's.

@StrickenBiged There quite a few developers that big, but it mostly independent companies. A lot of that bloat with Bungie probably comes from the fact they were independent for a while, so was managing their own self-publishing and marketing, Internal IT, Servers, merchandising/store front... etc.

Sometimes businesses people make critical decisions that average people know it's a failure. But they insist on their stupid decisions, mostly due to their inflated ego. Imagine this 3.2b could've been spent on several potentially profitable games with 1st or 3rd party studios...

Even though this deal was in the works prior to Activision/Blizzard, I wonder how much it swayed Sony's final decision.

@get2sammyb while some credit is due for leading the ORGANIZATION through that, the product literally sold itself to the tune if scalpers selling it for thousands, not much challenge making it successful there, and our current game drought speaks to maybe not having managed studios well at the time.

What a scam and a cash grab.

First they buy a worthless studio, then they offer them a lot of money to stay on, then the studio fails and everyone who aren't staying gets a golden severance package.

Wow. Jimmy Ryan was such a bad decision maker in terms of what I wanted to see happen. I don't respect PlayStation any more, and I don't trust them to make decisions that are good for the likes of me.

@twitchtvpat I'm talking about his decisions when he was CEO, not years before that

@NEStalgia Now I want a remaster of Infamous thanks. I really want this game to be released on the current gen even if it only gets the basic upgrades.

@Flaming_Kaiser I would be so ready for that! I absolutely loved the first game. The second gets the most praise, but that first one just hit all the right notes in mood and loop to me! Both games make up two of my all-time favorite PS games though.

@NEStalgia I even liked the PS4 ones but I liked the expansion more then the original game on the PS4 those earth powers on the end came way to late. 😢

@Flaming_Kaiser Yeah, I liked the PS4 one but it was missing a big "something" the first 2 had. It felt kind of empty and rushed to hit launch window, the game finally opened up and then just stopped and it felt like you never explored big parts of the game you were meant to. Especially with the concrete power coming so late, I'm convinced there's a lot that got left on the cutting room floor there. I'll always feel like that game got cheated out of the intended last act (and a personality for the protag.) And it felt comparatively sterile vs the first 2 games. And yet I had fun playing it, no question. GoT is great and all, but I can't believe the older Sucker Punch IPs get ignored, it's great IP and I'll always blame Spiderman for supplanting a place for inFamous in the lineup (and IMO inFamous is the better series.)

@NEStalgia It missed Cole and I just didn't like Delsin as much I found him annoying at some points.

I liked Abigail Walker so much more then Delsin and really enjoyed playing the expansion and the price was fantastic.

The complete main game was good but you are right it missed some magic because his powers were awsome. The expansion for me was way more fun maybe it were the powers and Abigail performance made it even better for me.

If they just re-release the older games PS3 for a lower price polish it up with 60FPS and a resolution bump, the PS4 games just release a complete edition with a 60 FPS and resolution update the game looked gorgeous already on PS4.

@Flaming_Kaiser The outer shipping carton my PSVR2 came in had more personality than Delsin! IDK how they went from the really interesting, gravelly Cole & Zeek duo to....delsin. Lower case d. Upper case implies too much personality. Abigail was MUCH more "Cole" in tone.

I don't think it was just the powers, the whole game had, well, technically I could accuse GoT of some of the same problem, just better blended, of repetition. It kind of felt like you were walking around this sterile, glossy environment, with nothing in it, and not very interactive, fighting "arena" battles of the same enemies over and over. Where New Marais was incredibly varied and diverse in environment and was very "real" and lived in, and Empire City was almost a character on its own, the imposing "Gotham-esque" dark city brooding over the dark story, very lived in, lots going on. We go to "Seattle". From the fictional larger than life versions of real world settings we go to actual, literal Seattle, the most boring concept environment ever, where other than Grunge music it's only famed export is....Starbucks....yeah....bland and sterile...without personality...

IDK what happened to that game. It was a fun game. I enjoyed playing the game. I still wanted more of it. But it feels like the black sheep of the Sucker Punch family in many ways. It's perpendicular to even the rest of its own series. It kind of feels like a 3rd party inFamous clone rather than being inFamous. In some ways Insomniac's Spiderman feels half-way in between inFamous, and Second Son, where it's slightly more inFamous than Second Son was, but not nearly as good as the first 2.

I'd love a real inFamous 4 that goes back to Cole and pretends delsin (lower case) was a dream that Cole had while falling asleep in Starbucks while looking at cat pictures on the internet. If I can't have that, a Bluepoint remake would be a dream. If I can't have that, I'll settle for the upres 60fps port.... It's really just such a great series, and I'll never forgive Spiderman for interfering with it.

@NEStalgia Maybe they too much on the graphics because it looked? The game looked bloody gorgeous the effects wow.

I would love to see a bit more special sidemissions I can understand that they wanted to showcase some of the controller features but tone it down or do it better.

AC is the perfect example of how not to do sidemissions it stretches the game and make the game worse instead.

The DLC which they sold separately would have been so much better in they put in the game instead of the boring sidemissions and maybe make people buy the game earlier at a higher price.

And Abigail should have been the good guy and whats his name should have been a side character. And getting Cole setup for part 4 is quite easy with the ending of part 2.

@Flaming_Kaiser They probably did, it was certainly a showcase of PS4 power early on and still holds up today. OTOH I can't imagine that even that level of tech demo on PS4 took more effort than trying to squeeze from the PS3 Cell the kind of performance they got from it for 1 and especially 2. PS3 was really rough on devs, and inFamous 2 is one of the best looking games on PS3.

Haha, yeah the obligatory "shake the controller" gimmick demo is one part I try to forget about. The waggle didn't really add to the game. But the lack of side missions compared to 1 and 2, now that you mention it, definitely made the game feel kind of "lean." An open world game lives and dies on its side quests that makes it feel like many things are going on at the same time. Second Son has a lot in common with Spiderman actually, where it almost feels like the open world is an afterthought. 1 and 2 got the balance right. Second Son, GoT, and Spiderman (despite being Insomniac) actually have a lot in common IMO in terms of underdeveloping side missions with too little variety and too much copy paste bloat. inFamous 1 and 2 really mastered how to build open world sandbox missions.

Wow. Fetch as the main protag would have been awesome! Interesting character, lots of personality and some mystery. Way better than Cardboardman. I'd so much love to get Cole back for a new entry. Maybe they could set him up well after 2. Though Zeke was an important foil for his character. It might be harder to make him feel 3 dimensional if they don't pull Zeke back in somehow.

@NEStalgia Yeah I agree Cole should be more independent as a character but he was way better then Cardboardman. 😆🤣

Fetch was way better indeed she was so much fun even her ending was better. Maybe the good and bad trope take away from the characters.

The grey path is probably more interesting nobody will probably be 100% good or bad it's also way less realistic.

@Flaming_Kaiser Cole had an energy (giggle) to him. Gritty, rough, but an energy. And he stood out in contrast to his world, with mystery and intrigue. And his environment was interesting. Dark, foreboding, oppressive, mysterious.

Delsin was simultaneously brooding angsty emo and a one dimensional background tree. And his environment was Seattle. No, not the Seattle of Nirvana and Pearl Jam, no. The Seattle of Starbucks and Google. And Deus Ex Invisible War.

Fetch was basically just FemCole. Which is why she was good lol. Energy, gritty, mystery, and a little bit of the Nirvana Seattle too. Right down to being strung out on drugs lol.

@NEStalgia Just make a new entry with Fetch and im happy. 😁