Destiny developer Bungie announced layoffs today, with plans to cut 220 people across the studio, which will include "most of our executive and senior leader roles."
Bungie CEO Pete Parsons cited "rising costs of development and industry shifts as well as enduring economic conditions" for the decision, which will affect about 17% of the studio's workforce.
In addition to the cuts, Parsons wrote that Bungie is "working to integrate 155 of our roles, roughly 12%, into [owner Sony] 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."
Parsons wrote that Bungie is also "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. "
Parsons explained that
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.
"We got spread too thin so we cut people" is some logic awfully reminiscent of Microsoft's recent explanations for closing several Bethesda studios back in May. In another of layoffs' greatest hits, Parsons also wrote that "our rapid expansion ran headlong into a broad economic slowdown," reasoning many companies have cited for the layoffs that have affected over 10,000 game developers in 2024 alone.
As noted by The Verge's Tom Warren, this means Bungie has shed around 300 jobs in less than a year, with the studio previously seeing a number of layoffs in October 2023. Those layoffs contributed to what Bungie developers described to IGN in December as a "soul-crushing" atmosphere of freezes and loss of workplace quality-of-life initiatives. Parsons wrote in the announcement that "We still have over 850 team members building Destiny and Marathon, and we will continue to build amazing experiences that exceed our players’ expectations."
Bungie owner Sony had broader layoffs in February of this year, which saw the closure of its London Studio.
