As of today, 220 roles in Bungie will be eliminated, removing roughly 17% of their workforce, as reported by Pete Parsons, the CEO of Bungie. This news comes as a blog post on the Bungie website titled “The New Path for Bungie.”
These layoffs result from 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.”
Pete Parsons goes on to say that these layoffs will affect people from all over Bungie. From junior roles to the most executive roles, they will affect plenty of people across the team. To try and compensate the people affected by these layoffs, Parsons has assured that there is a “generous exit package, including severance, bonus, and health coverage.”
In addition to the 220 people who are losing their jobs, Parsons goes on to explain two major changes that will be happening within Bungie and how they will affect the company as a whole. The first announcement is their deepening integration with Sony Interactive Entertainment. By deepening the integration, it means that 155 roles, which is 12% of the company, will be integrated into Sony Interactive Entertainment in a slow, methodical order.
“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.”
In addition to the wider Sony Interactive Entertainment integration, Bungie has also announced that they are working with PlayStation Studios leadership to create one of their incubation projects. This will be an action game set in a new science-fantasy universe. By developing this game, Bungie hopes to form a new studio within PlayStation Studios to “continue its promising development.”
While they have let go of 220 people today in new layoffs, Bungie still has over 850 team members who are working on consistent development for Destiny and Marathon and “will continue to build amazing experiences that exceed our players’ expectations.”
While Parsons explains how they got into this position, much of it revolving around the negative turnout for Destiny 2: Lightfall, he also expresses how they needed to give both The Final Shape and Marathon “the time needed to ensure both projects deliver at the quality our players expect and deserve.” However, as a result of this, he admits they were overly ambitious, with financial safety margins exceeded and their finances beginning to run into the red.
As part of his sign off on the blog post, he also expresses that they will talk about their goals and projects in the future, but that update will not come today.
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