Bungie the Next PlayStation-Owned Dev to Suffer Layoffs

Lots of this going on all of a sudden and just before Christmas, not nice at all.
I’m beginning to believe the game industry is one of the most cut throat out there at the minute.

This is so weird, especially after the 1 billion for employee retention. There have been reports too that Sony is pivoting from its GaaS focus after backlash from studios. Maybe this is a part of that? Anyways, it’s incredibly bad that short sighted previous leadership decisions is now being the burden of employees, some of which seemed beloved by fans from what I’m seeing on twitter.

Maybe it has more to do with all these companies hiring like crazy during the pandemic and now they realize the growth wasn't that big to maintain the profit they wanted.

It’s a sad moment for people and never nice to have to experience no matter the industry you work in, however with the insane costs of AAA games now, it sounds like they’re being very risk averse and people are the ones bearing the brunt as the companies will continue to make insane profits.

I can't see how this can happen with the apparent $1billion investment towards retaining staff. Unless Sony changed their minds.

Terrible, hate to see people getting laid off, this is top level Japan/Sony finally cleaning up Jim Ryan's mess. Bungie is Ryan's magnum opus and it is a complete and utter whiff.
Have a feeling the recovery process on the damage he's done to the game pipeline is not going to be fun.

Some pretty weird stuff has been piling up over the last few months. Hopefully, the situation isn't as dire as it seems.

Maybe if studios made more good games like Deus Ex and less ***** like Assassin's Creed and it's clones the industry would be in a healthy state.

In the business in which I work, getting and holding experts is generally a must these days due to demographic change. I wonder whether these layoffs are too shortsighted, because these experts are lost for the companies to competitors. But maybe the labour market for software developers and software marketing in Washington state is different, who knows?

@OldGamer999 It not just the gaming industry. As many have said before, it the entire Tech industry that going through this. Hired a bunch of people due to remote working during COVID and are now lay off a bunch of people.

I still don’t understand why Bungie was the one Sony splurged 3.8 billion for. They hardly make new games, the game they do make has a smaller dedicated fanbase which these games were coming everywhere and remain everywhere (good for gamers)

Bungie are massive, they have 1100 employees and we don't know how many have been laid off yet.
It may not be that many, plus Forbes is apparently reporting that most of them are from the publishing side of bungie which makes sense with the news that Marathon and the destiny expansion are delayed.

@OldGamer999 As someone else mentioned it's wider spread than just the gaming industry. Google, Amazon and Microsoft all layed off over 10,000 staff each, three of the richest companies out there.

@Rmg0731 Cause Bungie know how to milk their fanbase. The money alone from Destiny is probably more money than any studio that Sony owns has ever made. It profit is only rivaled by other massive live service games.

I think it is more indicative of the global economy and not the games industry. I survived a big round of layoffs (for now anyways) at the bank I work for. Not many people are bullish on the next few years across the globe.

A lot of people point to consumer spending as a sign that everything is hunky dory but consumer dept is skyrocketing.

@UltimateOtaku91
That’s true unfortunately definitely doing the rounds at the minute.

@AverageGamer
I was wondering if it was due to over recruiting during covid in the tech industry overall.
Still unfortunate though.

@Deoxyr1bose Please let the backlash be true.

Absolutely f**k right off. In the run up to Christmas too, no chance any of the higher-ups took the slightest pay cut either. What was the point of spending billions on the company then? Liana Ruppert is a gem, she should be snapped up as soon as possible.

@Savage_Joe Why? The only good Halo game is Combat Evolved. Bungie is a ***** developer and have proven that since Halo CE. The Bungie fanboys need to wake up, 343 was made up of mostly Bungie employees after all. If you played the games like I did, from before and after the switch, aside from general QoL updates, THEY'RE ALL THE SAME. It's not like Halo went from being a poor fps to being a shoddy RPG, no, it stayed a poor fps and played exactly the same. Halo Infinite feels no different in basic gameplay structure than Halo CE.

@Nepp67 I hope it is. Microsoft has already proven gamers, real gamers that is, hate GAAS because every single one of their forced GAAS anti-consumer-pass fodder titles from Sea of Thieves to Halo Infinite has flopped. Yeah yeah, MS throws made up metrics out there to fool the naive but we all know those games are dead. Hell, Rare is finally putting in PvE servers for Sea of Flops after vehemently bashing the fanbase who wanted them (and backing the toxic community who wanted to continue abusing the pirate narrative to grief players) because their game is literally dead in the water. Pretty soon it'll be taken offline and only have PvE functionality because it isn't profitable.

@RobynAlecksys that’s how you see it. I played all Halo games one after the other. The best one is undoubtedly Halo 2. It improved on everything CE had. And I saw the degradation in quality from Halo 4 onwards. 343i really did a bad rep on the series, and I can’t wait for another studio to take over

@UltimateOtaku91 @OldGamer999 Yeah the COVID hiring surge is coming back to bite the companies that went big. At my part/company (which is part of a massive Tech corpo) we started a big hiring push, then stopped and went on a freeze to minimize or avoid layoffs. We also had to pause or delay a lot of project to prio the big ones.
At the end of the day all this sucks - My honest belief (as a self-assesed Destiny 2 Whale) is that this is Bungie driven. Sony is allowing Bungie to act still as an independent body within the whole. This could have come from Sony for sure, but what I know leads me to believe this is less likely.

This is getting ridiculous half these companies r supposedly doing great breaking records and whatnot and people r still losing there jumps it's heartbreaking constantly hearing about this

Not to pivot the conversation. This really has me worried for what the ABK/XB merger will lead to for layoffs in ABK.

I am sure that will be another ugly one. Even Bethesda had few layoffs. All of this is not fun

Just saw they laid liana ruppert off from bungie. That girl has a heart of gold and will be sorely missed in the bungie community team.

I honestly don’t understand how just months ago they were allowed to “evaluate” and take decisions on another studio’s game (Factions) and now they’re being laid off, I’m increasingly concerned that acquiring Bungie was a bad move for Sony who is widely recognized for their single-player experiences.

@IOI You think all You know from internet is real? Dude, come on.
You Believe this: " Not to pivot the conversation. This really has me worried for what the ABK/XB merger will lead to for layoffs in ABK.

I am sure that will be another ugly one. Even Bethesda had few layoffs. All of this is not fun"
is real?

@streetshadow
I’m in aerospace and even we had working from home we didn’t add more employees and still have about 50 vacancies.
Though early next year we going to get even more employees back at work for more days.
I personally worked at work through the whole pandemic and still do now as my place is on site.

@Tr3mm0r What are you trying to talk about?

@IOI If You can't understand then nothing. Closing contracts and lay offs are alien to You.
You never worked on salary?

I don't thing I've played a Bungie game ever. Nope, not even that one.

@OldGamer999 Hahahahahhahahahah

@Tr3mm0r If you aren’t a 5 y/o fanboy then I don’t get you, who’s saying all the people they laid off had limited contracts that expired at the same time? Did you say the same about the laid offs at several other companies including Microsoft?

Every single time there’s big laid offs it should be condemned and criticized, a company shouldn’t be able to spent billions acquiring companies only to fire their employees months later, and yes, including Zenimax and Activision Blizzard, when that eventually happens (cause it will happen) I’m going to complain all the same.

Totally forgot Playstation owned Bungien

It's a massive shame when this happens.

As much as I love video games, I'm glad I don't work at a studio making them cause I would worry every day would be my last day at the job.

@nessisonett Is it better to kicked out after the holidays when you are broke? There is no good time to fire people it's always terrible. I hope the lady finds a job soon I hear a lot of nice things about her here.

@Deadlyblack I feel you. Growing up during the height of Xbox 360/PS3 era, I had dreamed about working at a game studio especially Bungie. But the more I learn about the industry, the more I realize how toxic it is... There were a lot of layoffs even back then, but then you combine in the crunch lifestyle and toxic masculinity. It not a great industry to work in.

Luckily, i was able to my computer degree and pivot to a different part of the tech world, where i don't have to consistently worry about lay off if a game doesn't sell enough copies. I also make 20x more money and work remote.

@Weebleman I never heard of her but lets hope she finds a job soon. Hearing that she is loved in the community makes it even more terrible.

I think the COVID boom with unending profits made the companies overreach. I have to be honest I don't really see why Sony went for Bungie but who am i to complain.

That's why we need developers to stay independent. If it's Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, Epic in the end they don't give a damn about the smaller workers.

With the Embracer group i saw it coming from miles away growth with nothing special coming from them and the amount of developers they bought made it massive risk.

So where did the 1 billion for employee retention go? Perhaps to the people at the very top like usual? 😐 Unfortunately Jim Ryan's reign isn't ending soon enough, I can imagine the mess he left that we aren't aware of yet

@Flaming_Kaiser This is exactly the case I see. The layoffs we have seen at Sony (so far) have been in studios or places where their product was not returning profits that either the studio higher ups or SIE expected.
Sad but games have to make profits and when they don't it's not always the execs that will take the fall it will be on the ground folks like you and me.

New studios pop up all the time and this talent can and most likely will land another job quickly. Still stinks as losing a job is never ideal. Part of the industry sadly, but talented hard workers never stay down for long.

Once Sony started putting their games on PC I knew it was the beginning of a slippery slope, I kept telling people on here and people were just like 'I'm happy more people get to play the games'

Well I hate to say it but I told you so, once Sony started to try and expand with a focus on PC/mobile/GAAS and ignore their core base the writing was on the wall.

Studios in turmoil, upper management in disarray, no road map, PSVR2 overpriced and sent out to die . . . all they had to do was repeat the success off the PS4 but no it wasn't enough being market leader, they had to go and chase more money, and it's failed spectacularly

Ok this is not funny... What is wrong with Sony right now???

Well, I hear From Software is hiring.

Kinda off topic in a way but it has been past time Jim and Hermen be asked some serious questions. I know Bungie isn't technically under Hermen but PlayStation studios status is looking suspect despite Spider-Man 2's release, we know nothing about 2024 from their internal studios other than a gaas game we haven't seen any gameplay for. Spider-Man 2 was the only 2023 game. There's clearly looking like some f'ups been happening imo. The gaming press is the weakest of any industry probably.

@-Sigma- Well speaking of ''press'', Henderson is accurate with PS hardware so the Pro will come out. It does make sense to promote/develop your game with the Pro. People tend to forget under Jim Ryan all bigger studio have 2-3 teams now and PS studios has doubled in size since 2020.

@Tharsman Sadly this is not a Sony/PlayStation only problem. There have been layoffs across tech and gaming for the past year now, no matter the level of success. Google, Meta, and MS laid off roughly 10,000each earlier this year. Gaming related the MS layoffs impacted 343, The Coalition, and newly acquired Bethesda.
It is rare that Sony does layoffs - so that might be the alarming part. We don't have the full scale of number of people

@-Sigma- Another thing is that PS has started to creep into a trend of only showing a game when it is ready. There is a delicate balance you must meet.
Show a game to early and people will constantly ask and speculate where is it (Elder Scrolls 6, The Last Guardian). But if you show your hand too late then people will wonder, WHERE are the GAMES?!

@Tharsman You payed 3 billion for a company way to much. After the acquisition what games did see come from it? And as we all know liveservice is expensive and they lost 45% of revenue.

Now let's translate if your boss loses 45% of revenue what do you think what will happen in the company.

@streetshadow With gamers it's never right especially hardcore gamers. And when there is real injustice you are woke.