Yet another Sony owned studio hit with layoffs in what’s obviously turning out to be cost cutting measures by Sony following lackluster a string of lackluster returns on investment for massive single player titles that spiraled into the hundreds of millions of dollars across their development.
Just a week ago it was announced that Sony had sacked numerous individuals across many of its visual arts division studios, mainly from Media Molecule but several other first party firms were affected as well, Bungie now join their ranks after having been purchased by Sony in July 2022 for the laughable sum of $3.6 Billion dollars USD.
Bungie currently employs around 1,200 staff members, and according to Bloomberg, roughly 8% of them have been given their marching orders.
The alleged reason being these layoffs is being scapegoated as loss of player interest in Destiny 2 which absolutely has nothing to do with the predatory microtransactional aspect to the game which essentially forces players to continually pay to actually experience majority of the content in the now turned free-to-play title.
This is total bullshit considering how the game despite being several years old at this point maintains a massive daily player count, while trends have thankfully been dropping as time goes by there’s still tens of thousands of simpletons playing Destiny 2 at any given point in time on PC alone, excluding consoles.
Players are finally warming up to the fact that Destiny 2 is predatory drip fed garbage, a far cry from the original Destiny which was a flawed jewel of a game, with their recent Lightfall expansion not only demanding $50 it just so happened to be the worst received DLC for Destiny 2 to date, holding a 31% ratio on Steam.
Bungie are set to release their next story expansion for Destiny 2 dubbed “The Final Shape”, again for the meager sum of $50 USD which aims to conclude the current story arc that Destiny has been building for a decade now, however Bungie’s own revenue targets are allegedly well below expectations as Destiny 2 is finally starting to show its age as player retention slowly declines.
So naturally as any overgrown game corporation does, they start to ransack themselves and oust deadweight, with majority of these 100 or so employee layoffs coming from Bungie’s support departments, community managers and publishing, except in this case where the musical maestro of Destiny also got his marching orders.
Musical composer, Michael Salvatori who has worked with Bungie for over a decade, in fact he has been working with Bungie from the very beginning in limited forms, as the co-composer for Halo Combat Evolved, Halo 2, Halo 3 and OSDT and Halo Reach.
He is an iconic figurehead in regards to Destiny’s soundtrack, arguably one of the only decent quality aspects to the game was the new and inscriptive music introduced with each and every expansion, but clearly the executives at Bungie amidst missing profit targets viewed Michael as being expendable after his work for The Final Shape wrapped up.
While Bungie may lose one of the greatest musical composures in the entire industry, fear not for Peter Sarrett, lead game designer and Brendan Thorne, design director, are still very much apart of the Bungie fold.
Isn’t that lovely?
Given how Bungie are one of the most woke game companies on the planet, endlessly virtue signaling for minority ethnicities and sexualities which undoubtedly have been incorporated into their games with progressive themes and values, it comes as no surprise that a company of Bungie’s nature has ~1200 employees on the payroll.
All impacted employees are set to receive a minimum of three months’ worth of severance pay and three months of Bungie-covered COBRA health insurance however, additional benefits are stated to have concluded as of Monday.
Again, these layoffs are nothing new, Bungie are purging themselves of excess weight as they alongside just about every other studio owned by Sony are mercilessly gorging themselves on cash to produce large scale titles that barely scrape back their initial investments, of which Bungie has yet to be officially leveraged by Sony as of yet as they’re continually expanding upon Destiny 2 while they’re undoubtedly working on a new entry for their newfound PlayStation ownership.
I’m still flabberghast as to how Sony were scammed into paying $3.6 Billion for Bungie, so much money wasted for a studio worth a fraction of that amount, right around the same time Microsoft sought to buy out Activision.
