Bungie Announces Major Layoffs and Strategic Changes

Postado 2024-08-05 16:16:20

This morning, I’m sharing some of the most difficult changes we’ve ever had to make as a studio. Due to rising development costs, industry shifts, and ongoing economic conditions, we must make substantial changes to our cost structure and focus our development efforts entirely on Destiny and Marathon.

Starting today, 220 roles will be eliminated, representing roughly 17% of our studio’s workforce.

These layoffs will impact every level of the company, including most of our executive and senior leadership roles.

Today is a difficult and painful day, especially for our departing colleagues, all of whom 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 offer a generous exit package, including severance, bonuses, and health coverage.

I realize this is hard news, especially following the success we have seen with The Final Shape. However, after navigating the broader economic realities over the last year and exhausting all other mitigation options, this decision has become necessary to refocus our studio and business with more realistic goals and viable financials.

We are committing to two other major changes today to support our focus, leverage Sony’s strengths, and create new opportunities for Bungie talent.

First, we are deepening our integration with Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE), 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, allowing us to retain a great deal of talent that would otherwise have been affected by the reduction in force.

Second, we are collaborating 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, our goal has been to ship games in three enduring, global franchises. To realize that ambition, we initiated 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 the quality our players expect and deserve. We were overly ambitious, our financial safety margins were exceeded, and we began running in the red.

Faça Login para curtir, compartilhar e comentar!