Rumor: PlayStation to Lay Off At Least 50% of Bungie Staff This Summer - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 16 June 2026 / 9,110 Views
French journalist at TV and radio network BFMTV Sylvain Trinel on social media is claiming to have heard Bungie is set to lay off at least 50 percent of its staff this summer.
"Bungie should expect massive layoffs this summer," said Trinel (via Google Translate). "I'm treading carefully, but I'm hearing talk of at least 50% of the workforce affected (permanent or contract staff) following the end of Destiny 2 and the situation with Marathon."
These claims follow a report from Bloomberg's Jason Schreier that stated Bungie is planning a significant number of layoffs following the ending of new content updates for Destiny 2. There are also currently no plans to start production on Destiny 3.
Trinel also says to expect a "massive bloodbath" with layoffs across the gaming industry and to keep on eye on the date of July 1.
There was another report from Jason Schreier claiming first-party Xbox studios - Ninja Theory, Double Fine, and Compulsion Games - are all at risk of closure and are currently negotiating with Microsoft to buy themselves back and go independent. Other studios at Xbox are also at risk of closure.
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 follow the author on Bluesky.
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They spent 3.6b for 1 live service game and a studio that they didn't even get full control....biggest heist in video game history.
also we learnt from leaks, of people that left bungie, that it was in the red (loseing money) and needed a buyer to survive when it was sold. They tricked Sony hard.
Imagine what PlayStation could have gotten with that 3.6b. buying deus ex franchise and tomb raider for 200m like embracer did or got SE or from soft since they were attempting to do that anyway.
Anything but this massive sink hole called bungie.
Crystal Dynamics and Eidos Montreal make massive losses every year for almost a decade
Blame phil on that one. If not for the activision blizard buy-out
Yeahhh more layoffs. This is never ending. Anyway new video discussing this and other layoffs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TnhCqu72JXQ
Sony biggest stupidly mistake ever made!! Should of brought From software, Squarenix, Capcom and Namcobandai with that money they wasted on scummy bungie.
Imagine dozen new games every year instead, would've made back the buyout in 5 years or so
$3.6 billion scam
3.6 Billion to buy Bungie? They could have fully funded over 10 single player games for that amount of money.
The studio that they did not bought or owned that was gonna make a liver service games was arrowhead and that one is the biggest success.
Bungie is like 800+ devs right? you cannot justify that, to keep Marathon alive..... unless they have like 750 of those working on something new, you would need to do something to the size of the studio.
Well Sony knew what they were buying.
Imo, Bungie should have either kept making Halo with MS, full Halo 1-3 team and all, or they should have disbanded. They're going the way of Rare. It's sad to see.
...Do the layoffs ever end?
Not with the current business culture, particularly in tech type business models (the 'Office Space' culture, the Mike Judge film, has really expanded over everything). Corporations are about the song and dance of "doing the hard thing" to make the board happy. It's often a lot more arbitrary than people want to admit. A justification is usually stated, but it's often fabricated nonsense, or at least not the best decision, just the decision that made the biggest impression on certain people.
In other words, it's not really for the betterment of the business, but about a demonstration by management staff so their own superiors can look good. It's a game of impressions going all the way up to the board, for a series of bonuses and promotions at the expense of others below them. And the board generally has no investment into the lives of the staff; because they themselves just want to be able to make a good impression to shareholders who are often not very in tune to what's going on: "cost cut? thumbs up!"
The American corporate machine is a collective psychopath. One day Sony was likely telling Bungie "You guys are rock stars" and a few years later, guillotined.
No, once again its a corporate run industry, this will always happen every year,
From 1,600 employees in 2023 to potentially 400 in 2026. Incredible.
1,600 people under 1 single studio is ridiculous...In comparison Insomniac has 450 and they manage to output games.
What job do 80% of this 1600 are getting paid for exactly I wonder.
Destiny was a live-service MMO. Requires an insane amount of resources and developers to make seasonal content, annual expansions, etc. Insomniac only makes single player games. Not as many resources needed.
The biggest live service games can have thousands of developers working on them.
I agree with this. I don't think people fully appreciate how much goes into content update pipelines. Even for mobile games, some of the studios have 3 or 4 pods/cells of anywhere between 4 to 20 people cycling out updates with a core team and a network team. That's beside their QA, marketing, legal, product management, and general office staff (like HR, IT and such).
It's possible for small studios with very talented general-purpose sorts to work miracles, but it is unsustainable without life sacrifice, stress, and other mental issues. That's why a lot of those studios once they get past the founding phase, expand out their departments for the staff they actually need so they're not just working and sleeping and suffering breakdowns.
But embark only have 300 people yet all the games they made are live service like the finals and arc raiders. Oh and I just did a quick look at arrow head studio they have 150 people for HD2
Embark is also rapidly expanding. They grew from 100 people around 2022 to now over 350 (366 as of this winter, to be exact).
The amount of content a game like Destiny requires makes Finals/Arc Raiders and HD2 look like child’s play. Those games are only 1 thing each.
Destiny is about 5 different games in 1.
Arc Raiders has had basically zero major content releases since launch. There was one map added after launch but it was clearly already made or close to complete.
On steam destiny 2 has had a large uptick in players presently.
So they basically bought Bungie to close it.
Consolidation at its finest
This is because they turned Marathon into muck.
Its because they’ve ended support for Destiny 2. They had a large team to develop updates/expansions for that. Now support is ending, the team is being laid off.
When you have high budget games expect high budget layoffs
I don't know what the long term vision for Bungie was supposed to be. Destiny 2 was already somewhat old when Sony bought Bungie, and Marathon is way too unforgiving for broad appeal.
Sucks for the devs, because the quality of both titles was high. Seems like a bigger strategy problem.
The idiota never should have cancelles the naughydog online game
Even Shuhei Yoshida has made it clear that Naughty Dog didn't want to make that game anymore once they realized what supporting a live service title actually entails. he even said it was a lack of foresight on their part that put them in that situation.
Did anyone from naughtydog say that though? That sounds like pr talk to be honest. When you factor in the timing of it after the bungie buyout.
Let's talk real here. The guys at ND are smart, they did their homework before working on the game. They knew before development what live service entails. What happened is they were making a great product, which sony didn't want to have to take away from wheat bungie needed to work on , as a live service, to make money back on the 6 billion dollar purchase. You can't risk that investment up against a great online naughtydog game that gains popularity going head to head against another live service sony game
with the scale and hi demand in quality games today, the video game industry is going to have a hard time surviving
