Late last month, Bungie laid off 220 employees in a decision which—to put it lightly—has shaken the company. The impacted developers have already expressed their frustration, anger, and disappointment on social media, especially in the wake of claims that CEO Pete Parsons spent $2.4 million on vintage vehicles over the past 2 years.
This number, while not substantial in terms of Bungie’s budget, is still terrible optics and understandably upsetting for the developers—at least one of whom was due to receive the company’s maternity benefits right before being laid off or, as another employee claims, struggling with groceries while on Bungie’s payroll.
Further twisting the knife is a report from journalist Stephen Totilo, who spoke with several anonymous former Bungie employees in a Game File newsletter.
The newsletter claims, as per its sources, that “Bungie’s leaders had overstated their studio’s financial prospects to Sony, and Wednesday’s cuts were needed to stop continued losses that amounted to an ongoing reality check.”
One source tells Totilo that they think Sony overpaid for Bungie—a confession that gives me some pretty vicious flashbacks to Microsoft’s $68.7 billion acquisition of Blizzard, which was immediately followed up by a raft of layoffs. Or that one time Embracer bungled a $2 billion deal and eventually broke into three, with several studios either closed or sold to keep the lights on as it circled the drain.
What’s more, this overpromising and under-delivering was, the report claims, the reason these layoffs were decided on way in advance. The 2023 cuts were, as Totilo’s sources state, quickly realised to be insufficient by “at least early 2024″—with the former employees alleging that said cuts were planned even if The Final Shape did well.
This all paints an infuriating picture, if these reports are to be believed. A picture where a big company bought out a studio for way too much money, a thing that keeps happening over and over again.
Then, that studio’s leadership allegedly wrote checks they couldn’t cash, did not take cuts to their own pay, laid off staff in October of last year, knew for months that it wouldn’t be enough, and yet still managed to have some employees find out they’d be losing their jobs via Twitter announcement.
I’d wager that many of those employees, by the way, helped basically yank Destiny 2 out of the fire and produced a critically-acclaimed expansion that, quoting PC Gamer’s Phil Savage in his Destiny 2 review, was “nothing short of miraculous”. The lesson seems clear: You can do a great job and still lose your work because of someone else’s mistakes.