Bungie's wave of layoffs last October wasn't the end of the story, and now less than a year later, Bungie has announced another massive layoff of 220 employees, including 155 employees who will be transferred to other Sony studios and 75 people will join Bungie and Sony's new studio. After the layoffs, Bungie will still have 850 employees working on the Destiny franchise.
Bungie CEO Pete Parsons announced that the layoffs are impacting all levels of the company, including the majority of Bungie's top management and leadership. As for the reasons for the mass layoffs, Pete Parsons said that this was due to rising development costs, industry shifts, and the economic environment, as well as the poor quality of the Destiny 2 expansion Lightfall.
However, Pete Parsons also highlighted that Sony SIE has partnered with Bungie to create a new studio to incubate an "action game set in a new sci-fi world" that houses a large number of Bungie employees.
As part of Sony's "service-based gaming strategy," Bungie joined Sony PlayStation Studios in 2022 for $3.6 billion. However, in the two years since Bungie joined Sony, it has not recovered the fatigue of Destiny 2, and the new game "Marathon" has not improved. Bungie's performance has rightly upset Sony. But the subtlety is that Sony and Bungie created new studios to incubate new sci-fi games from Bungie, and at the same time, a large number of developers moved to other Sony SIE studios, causing a large number of developers to leave Bungie's leadership, and perhaps Sony's anger was more concentrated on Bungie's leadership.