Bungie Lays Off 220 Employees, 155 to Move to Sony Interactive Entertainment - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 31 July 2024 / 3,137 Views
Bungie announced it will be laying off 220 employees, which is roughly 17 percent of its total workforce. Every level of the developer will be affected by the layoffs, including executive and senior leader roles.
The layoffs are happening "due to rising costs of development and industry shifts as well as enduring economic conditions."
Bungie will be integrating more into Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE) as 155 employees, about 12 percent, will be moved into (SIE) over the next few quarters. SIE has worked to identify roles for many of Bungie's employees.
The developer is also working with PlayStation Studios to spin out on of its incubation projects to form a new studio within PlayStation Studios to continue development on an action game set in a brand-new science-fantasy universe.
Read the full statement from Bungie below:
This morning, I’m sharing with all of you some of the most difficult changes we’ve ever had to make as a studio. Due to rising costs of development and industry shifts as well as enduring economic conditions, it has become clear that we need to make substantial changes to our cost structure and focus development efforts entirely on Destiny and Marathon.
That means beginning today, 220 of our roles will be eliminated, representing roughly 17% of our studio’s workforce.
These actions will affect every level of the company, including most of our executive and senior leader roles.
Today is a difficult and painful day, especially for our departing colleagues, all of which have made important and valuable contributions to Bungie. Our goal is to support them with the utmost care and respect. For everyone affected by this job reduction, we will be offering a generous exit package, including severance, bonus and health coverage.
I realize all of this is hard news, especially following the success we have seen with The Final Shape. But as we’ve navigated the broader economic realities over the last year, and after exhausting all other mitigation options, this has become a necessary decision to refocus our studio and our business with more realistic goals and viable financials.
We are committing to two other major changes today that we believe will support our focus, leverage Sony’s strengths, and create new opportunities for Bungie talent.
First, we are deepening our integration with Sony Interactive Entertainment, working to integrate 155 of our roles, roughly 12%, into SIE over the next few quarters. SIE has worked tirelessly with us to identify roles for as many of our people as possible, enabling us together to save a great deal of talent that would otherwise have been affected by the reduction in force.
Second, we are working with PlayStation Studios leadership to spin out one of our incubation projects – an action game set in a brand-new science-fantasy universe – to form a new studio within PlayStation Studios to continue its promising development.
This will be a time of tremendous change for our studio.
Let’s unpack how we ended up in this position; it’s important to understand how we got here.
For over five years, it has been our goal to ship games in three enduring, global franchises. To realize that ambition, we set up several incubation projects, each seeded with senior development leaders from our existing teams. We eventually realized that this model stretched our talent too thin, too quickly. It also forced our studio support structures to scale to a larger level than we could realistically support, given our two primary products in development – Destiny and Marathon.
Additionally, in 2023, our rapid expansion ran headlong into a broad economic slowdown, a sharp downturn in the games industry, our quality miss with Destiny 2: Lightfall, and the need to give both The Final Shape and Marathon the time needed to ensure both projects deliver at the quality our players expect and deserve. We were overly ambitious, our financial safety margins were subsequently exceeded, and we began running in the red.
After this new trajectory became clear, we knew we had to change our course and speed, and we did everything we could to avoid today’s outcome. Even with exhaustive efforts undertaken across our leadership and product teams to resolve our financial challenges, these steps were simply not enough.
As a result, today we must say goodbye to incredible talent, colleagues, and friends.
This will be a challenging time at Bungie, and we’ll need to help our team navigate these changes in the weeks and months ahead. This will be a hard week, and we know that our team will need time to process, to ask questions, and to absorb this news. Today, and over the next several weeks, we will host team meetings and town halls, team breakout sessions, and private, individual sessions to ensure we are keeping our communication open and transparent.
Bungie will continue to make great games. We still have over 850 team members building Destiny and Marathon, and we will continue to build amazing experiences that exceed our players’ expectations.
There will be a time to talk about our goals and projects, but today is not that day. Today, our focus is on supporting our people.
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can contact the author on Twitter @TrunksWD.
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God damn.....not even at the peak of Halo 3 development did Bungie have 220 employees in total. With 75 employees being switched to a new studio within PlayStation Studios to work on an incubation project (according to Jason Schreier) and 155 employees being moved into Sony in general on top of the 220 straight up being laid off, I'm pretty sure this is the Sony takeover.
I wonder what that $1 billion in employee retention was used for then.
Oh yeah, I’m not saying the changes that Sony are making are unjustified. But I am a little surprised after the over 100 layoffs late last year to what has turned out to be a resounding success of a new expansion, I was figuring that Bungie would have saved themselves from such a takeover.
But from massive over hiring during 2020, to developers constantly warning executives about the dangers of plans they were making and how expensive those plans were, and the executives not listening to the developers warnings, the higher ups at Bungie dug their own grave.
Such a massive decline since the glory days of Halo-Halo 3. I was a huge Bungie/Halo/O'Donnell fan.
Well at least they tried finding a new place for a lot of people that would otherwise be laid off.
Executive mismanagement, what's new?
I do not see any big issues here. From what I see, Bungie is to big. Its Evident that keeping large service games going takes a huge amount of people but there is just so much you can spend compared to return when there are so many other service games taking away that valuable gamer resource which is Time. Spinning off some employees to Sony is just a nice way to say that whatever they are doing will be exclusive so it doesn't rub against their own policy of being Multiplatform. Either way not sure this is anything big outside of the people who could not find spots at Sony but hopefully their severance Package is nice and large and they easily find work .
I guess all that hands-off Bungie stuff was BS.
I mean, I get it. They spent a lot of money for the studio, and they need it perform better. But, this certainly isn't what Sony and Bungie promised us when the purchase happened.
Maybe they'll absorb some of their games into PlayStation Studios as well, so they can get around that promise of multi-platform releases.
If I remember correctly, Sony promised that Bungie would have control of content and publishing decisions, which it seems they have had, though no one knows how long that agreement extended. I don't think it needs to be explained that no one is going to sign a contract that gives up such rights forever.
Regardless, no owner is going to sit back while their property runs itself into the ground and devalues the shares they hold. I don't know why anyone would expect that. From what I can see, this is Bungie's mess and Sony has partially bailed them out in several areas, such as allowing them to spin off an incubation team into a new studio.
From what I can see, the indications are that Bungie was printing money and overextended themselves under the premise that the success of Destiny would last forever. I'm not sure what you wanted Sony to do in this situation.
This is about what I would expect anybody to do in this situation. I wouldn't let my extremely expensive purchase run itself into the ground either.
I am pointing out though that all this stuff we are told during mergers and acquisitions is just BS. These are big businesses, and they will say damn near anything just to get fans to not give them a hard time. It doesn't mean that they're actually going to follow through on what they say. This applies to everyone, not just Sony and Bungie.
Lol..Jeez
