Sony IGN: Bungie Devs Say Atmosphere Is ‘Soul-Crushing’ Amid Layoffs, Cuts, and Fear of Total Sony Takeover

[ShreddieMercury]

Full article here:

 

Bungie Devs Say Atmosphere Is ‘Soul-Crushing’ Amid Layoffs, Cuts, and Fear of Total Sony Takeover - IGN

WWW.IGN.COM

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One month after a major round of layoffs impacted roughly 100 Bungie employees of 1,200, those remaining at the Destiny developer say the cuts, as well as other cost-cutting measures, came alongside an apparent scramble by studio leadership to avoid a total Sony takeover.

 

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One month after a major round of layoffs impacted roughly 100 Bungie employees of 1,200, those remaining at the Destiny developer say the cuts, as well as other cost-cutting measures, came alongside an apparent scramble by studio leadership to avoid a total Sony takeover.

 

As it currently stands, Bungie is (on paper) a fully independent subsidiary of Sony. But its board of directors has been divided since the takeover in July of 2022. Among its current members are PlayStation Studios head Hermen Hulst, Sony senior VP Eric Lempel, Bungie co-founder Jason Jones, Bungie CTO Luis Villegas, and Bungie CEO Pete Parsons. The board as a whole is split between Sony and Bungie representatives, with Parsons serving as a tiebreaker vote. But speaking to IGN under condition of anonymity, multiple current and former Bungie employees described a department meeting that took place shortly after the layoffs, in which leaders hinted that this shared power may not last forever.

 

 

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Declaration of Dependence

 

While the exact details of Sony’s deal to acquire Bungie remain unknown to the public or employees, sources say they were told by leaders that the current split board structure is contingent on Bungie meeting certain financial goals. If Bungie falls short of certain financial goals by too great an amount, Sony is allowed to dissolve the existing board and take full control of the company. And with Destiny 2 expansion The Final Shape delayed into the next fiscal year and Bungie still investing heavily on Marathon, many employees understand that Bungie is struggling to meet the necessary targets to keep its last vestige of freedom. Such a takeover wouldn’t necessarily be shocking given its 2022 acquisition, but it would nevertheless be a stunning development for a company that has historically prided itself on its independence.

 

It was with this threat looming that Bungie leadership - not Sony, according to Parsons - made the choice to lay off roughly 100 employees last month. But the cost-cutting at Bungie isn’t limited to just personnel. Multiple current employees confirmed to IGN that the company has implemented numerous other cost-cutting measures recently, including a studio-wide hiring freeze, reduced travel budgets, elimination of holiday bonuses, keeping its annual Bungie Day virtual, delaying its weeklong company “Pentathalon” event to next December, and reducing numerous morale events such as cooking and knitting classes from monthly to quarterly. Bungie is also pausing or fully ending benefits like annual employee compensation adjustments to meet market rates, its new hire lunch program, employee donation matching, its peer recognition program, and gift cards for employees birthdays. And yearly studio performance bonuses this year will only be the contractually obligated 80% minimum, after being above 100% for good performance several previous years running.

 

 

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Along with the recent layoffs, this has resulted in a massive decay in morale within the company, according to IGN’s sources, one of whom told us that the mood within the studio has been “soul-crushing” over the last month. And it doesn’t sound like management is making any significant efforts toward improving the atmosphere, either. According to those still with the company, employee frustration and sadness in the days and weeks following the layoffs was met with a surprising amount of indifference or even outright flippancy or hostility from management. Several people we spoke to told us that leaders had reiterated, across multiple meetings, that they couldn’t guarantee there wouldn’t be more layoffs, with two specifically recalling chief people officer Holly Barbacovi outright stating that layoffs were a “lever” the company would pull again.

 

“We know we need Final Shape to do well,” one source told IGN. “And the feeling at the studio is that if it doesn’t we’re definitely looking at more layoffs.”

 

Others said they were rebuffed repeatedly and discouraged from even discussing the layoffs whenever they tried to ask questions. Employees in one department recalled a post-layoffs Q&A session where a department head was asked if leadership taking salary cuts to prevent layoffs had been considered, only to respond that Bungie was “not that type of company.”

 

 

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What’s more, sources we spoke to pointed out that many of the Bungie employees who were laid off were beloved community leaders within the studio, including many who had spearheaded employee inclusion and support efforts. Several people we spoke to expressed anger at the layoff of Bungie general counsel Don McGowan, who played a key role in Bungie winning an historic suit against a player who harassed a Bungie developer. Others laid off included a noticeable number of members of Bungie’s DE&I clubs, including co-heads of Pride@Bungie, Women@Bungie, and Accessibility@Bungie. When combined with other recent resource cuts, these dismissals have led to fears these clubs might be shut down. While researching this article, IGN noted that the public news articles announcing Women@Bungie and Accessibility@Bungie on its official blog were no longer accessible on the Bungie website, though it’s unclear exactly when or why this happened, or if it’s just an unintentional, recurring bug with the blog.

 

"I’m angry. I’m upset. This isn’t what I came here to do,” one person said. “It feels like many higher ups aren’t listening to the data and are like, ‘We just need to win our fans back, they still like us.’ No. They don’t...We got rid of some of our most knowledgeable beloved folks who have been here for 20+ years. Everyday I walk in afraid that I or my friends are next. No one is safe."

 

 

I was there day one for Halo, which still remains one of my all-time favorite games.  It's wild to see what has happened both to that franchise and its creators in the intervening twenty years as the industry moves further and further into the dystopian nightmare of service games.

[Commissar SFLUFAN]

Unfortunately, the unspoken reality is that Bungie probably wouldn't even exist in any form if not for the acquisition by Sony.

 

The stories of managerial incompetence and a technical structure that genuinely appears to be held together by duct tape long pre-dated the Sony acquisition.  Hell, it's entirely possible that Activision kept them from completely imploding.

[Paperclyp]

That sucks. One of the best devs for a long time. 

[Mr.Vic20]

It seems the Darkness has won out over the Light. 

[ShreddieMercury]

I don't think a lot of people appreciate how earth shattering the first two Halo games were.  The first one is still, to this day, ahead of its time in in regard to its overall design.  It also popularized the two stick control scheme on consoles that is (arguably detrimentally) still the standard. 

 

Halo 2 then provided the blueprint for online multiplayer on console, and popularized the type of cosmetic customization that eventually led to the disastrous micro-transaction bloat that we see now.  Without Halo 2, there is certainly no COD4, which then threw open the floodgates and led us in many general ways to where games still are now.

[eventide11]

Destiny for me got to be a slot machine for regurgitated content. I'm not surprised people stopped supporting the ONE game they worked mainly on

[Dodger]

Halo 6 will be made by Bungie.

[AbsolutSurgen]

Bungie left Microsoft because they wanted to make a game like Destiny, which turned out to be a great game.

 

However, because of technical limitations (or at least that is what I have heard), it became VERY hard to get the kind of content pipeline that would keep a GaaS going.  And, consequently a lot of the people who were WAY into Destiny early on gravitated to other games (I am one of them).  You need the revenue to keep the lights on, and pay all of the great perks that people want.  The problem is largely one of their own making.

 

Halo was a very good game, however I don't really understand putting it on a pedestal.  There were other great shooters before it (i.e. Half Life, Quake 3, etc.) that, on the whole, were better games.  They DID figure out how to finally get decent FPS controls on a controller -- but those controls are still far inferior to KB/Mouse.

[Bacon]

Marathoning to their Destiny

[Keyser_Soze]

53 minutes ago, AbsolutSurgen said:

Halo was a very good game, however I don't really understand putting it on a pedestal.  There were other great shooters before it (i.e. Half Life, Quake 3, etc.) that, on the whole, were better games.  They DID figure out how to finally get decent FPS controls on a controller -- but those controls are still far inferior to KB/Mouse.

 

My man did not play Outtrigger. Great FPS on a controller before Halo.

[Brian]

I’m surprised by the outright panic of a Sony takeover. I would think being brought under the Sony umbrella would be an improvement over the current management.  

[AbsolutSurgen]

23 minutes ago, Keyser_Soze said:

 

My man did not play Outtrigger. Great FPS on a controller before Halo.

I did not -- in the late 90s, early 00s, I was primarily a PC gamer for FPS games.

[Keyser_Soze]

5 minutes ago, AbsolutSurgen said:

I did not -- in the late 90s, early 00s, I was primarily a PC gamer for FPS games.

 

I wasn't referring to you, I mean the op.

[legend]

1 hour ago, AbsolutSurgen said:

Halo was a very good game, however I don't really understand putting it on a pedestal.  There were other great shooters before it (i.e. Half Life, Quake 3, etc.) that, on the whole, were better games.  They DID figure out how to finally get decent FPS controls on a controller -- but those controls are still far inferior to KB/Mouse.

 

Not everything is for everyone. But Halo was and remains an amazing game. I played a lot of  PC shooters back then too: The *original* (as in Quake 1) TF, Quake 3, Unreal Tournament, Tribes, etc. More story driven "first person" games like Deus Ex were also one of my favorite games of the time. (Deus Ex still ranks really high for me). Halo still stole my and my friends time more than any other shooter at the time though.

[Bacon]

While I did play halo 1 and 2, it wasn't until 3 came out that I have the series a shot, and damn if Halo isn't amazing. Halo 3 was my life for at least a year. I played other games, but even when Reach came out I was still going back to Halo 3.

[Brick]

As a fan of Destiny, this is disheartening to read. 

[TwinIon]

I think the bottom line is that Bungie dug themselves into a giant hole with Destiny 2 in both how it was being developed and how it was monetized. First they built a live service game that wasn't great at being a live service game. Then they had to figure out how to keep it going, and to their credit, they did. Unfortunately while they built a system for putting out content, that wasn't paying the bills, so they had to resort to the monetization scheme of a free-to-play game, but without the kind of casual user base or content that keeps those games flush with new players, dooming them to build ways to milk their hardcore audience endlessly.

 

With the entire company bet on one continuing game, they haven't been able to put out another game for years, and when they did start developing that next game, it took valuable resources away from Destiny, making that game noticeably worse. They'd put out blog posts explaining how their core playlists of PvE, PvP, and PvEvP were central to the game, but all the PvP people were working on Marathon, so they'd go years between releasing new PvP maps in a live service game. Even as someone who never liked the PvP in Destiny, it was insulting, and as someone who enjoyed their PvEvP mode, it sucked that as time went on the number of maps and play modes actually went down. The PvE stuff kept me playing the game for much longer than I should have, but it's been clear for a long time that they couldn't figure out how to balance production and draw in new audiences.

[AbsolutSurgen]

17 minutes ago, legend said:

 

Not everything is for everyone. But Halo was and remains an amazing game. I played a lot of  PC shooters back then too: The *original* (as in Quake 1) TF, Quake 3, Unreal Tournament, Tribes, etc. More story driven "first person" games like Deus Ex were also one of my favorite games of the time. (Deus Ex still ranks really high for me). Halo still stole my and my friends time more than any other shooter at the time though.

I was in my late 20s when Halo came out, so my friends and I weren't really getting together to play shooters - and the ones we did play were online, not split screen.

 

I thought Deus Ex was a great game -- though I have never really thought of it as an FPS.

 

Quake 3 (was my game of choice), but some of my friends swore by Unreal Tournament.

[ShreddieMercury]

53 minutes ago, Keyser_Soze said:

 

I wasn't referring to you, I mean the op.

 

I own Outtrigger, and no, it's not good on controller haha.  The original arcade cabinet had a trackball to control aiming.  It's really only fully playable on Dreamcast with a keyboard and mouse.  You can play it with a controller but you're severely constrained.

[best3444]

33 minutes ago, AbsolutSurgen said:

I was in my late 20s when Halo came out, so my friends and I weren't really getting together to play shooters - and the ones we did play were online, not split screen.

 

I thought Deus Ex was a great game -- though I have never really thought of it as an FPS.

 

Quake 3 (was my game of choice), but some of my friends swore by Unreal Tournament.

 

Wait. So you're almost 50?

[Biggie]

Destiny is old and stale. Hard to believe people still play it online. 

[Spawn_of_Apathy]

1 hour ago, Brian said:

I’m surprised by the outright panic of a Sony takeover. I would think being brought under the Sony umbrella would be an improvement over the current management.  

they lose their autonomy, developing only what Sony approves, and drop both Xbox and PC communities. Larger publishers take less risks and are less willing to let a studio “fix it” or “turn it around” if they have full control. 

[AbsolutSurgen]

14 minutes ago, best3444 said:

 

Wait. So you're almost 50?

You can get rid of the almost.

[best3444]

Just now, AbsolutSurgen said:

You can get rid of the almost.

 

Had no clue, grandpa. 

[AbsolutSurgen]

[crispy4000]

22 minutes ago, Spawn_of_Apathy said:

they lose their autonomy, developing only what Sony approves, and drop both Xbox and PC communities. Larger publishers take less risks and are less willing to let a studio “fix it” or “turn it around” if they have full control. 

Dropping PC?  Highly unlikely considering Sony’s newfound willingness to quickly port multiplayer games.

 

Xbox would only be a maybe.  If only because Bungie’s current business model is too reliant on being on everything.

 

If they went back to developing less GaASy stuff, I could see Sony pushing them to go in the direction Microsoft took Bethesda.

[Spawn_of_Apathy]

1 hour ago, TwinIon said:

I think the bottom line is that Bungie dug themselves into a giant hole with Destiny 2 in both how it was being developed and how it was monetized. First they built a live service game that wasn't great at being a live service game. Then they had to figure out how to keep it going, and to their credit, they did. Unfortunately while they built a system for putting out content, that wasn't paying the bills, so they had to resort to the monetization scheme of a free-to-play game, but without the kind of casual user base or content that keeps those games flush with new players, dooming them to build ways to milk their hardcore audience endlessly.

 

With the entire company bet on one continuing game, they haven't been able to put out another game for years, and when they did start developing that next game, it took valuable resources away from Destiny, making that game noticeably worse. They'd put out blog posts explaining how their core playlists of PvE, PvP, and PvEvP were central to the game, but all the PvP people were working on Marathon, so they'd go years between releasing new PvP maps in a live service game. Even as someone who never liked the PvP in Destiny, it was insulting, and as someone who enjoyed their PvEvP mode, it sucked that as time went on the number of maps and play modes actually went down. The PvE stuff kept me playing the game for much longer than I should have, but it's been clear for a long time that they couldn't figure out how to balance production and draw in new audiences.

I think a big problem was a bunch of their top talent was also getting burned out on Destiny. Some may have left if they didn’t get to work on something else. I think their mistake was making it another massive several hundred million dollar AAA game. They should have just done a smaller title, more inline with a AA or Indy title as a way to just take a break. A few small quirky games that give people time to explore creative ideas with an 8-12 month dev cycle. If one of the ideas explodes in popularity they can always expand on it. 
 

Without the expectation of Destiny 2 needing to fund itself, another AAA game, and whatever media projects Bungie was trying to cook up I don’t think D2 turns into the monetization, cookie cutter, hellscape it has become. 

[crispy4000]

Or how about a single player Marathon game again.  What a thought.

[Spawn_of_Apathy]

2 minutes ago, crispy4000 said:

Dropping PC?  Highly unlikely considering Sony’s newfound willingness to quickly port multiplayer games.

 

Xbox would only be a maybe.  If only because Bungie’s current business model is too reliant on being on everything.

 

If they went back to developing single player focused stuff, I could Sony pushing them to go in the direction Microsoft took Bethesda.

Sony barely supports PC and who knows if the new PlayStation CEO will even see it as viable. 2+ years for just some of their games. And that may end if PlayStation leadership decides they won’t get more console sales being 100% exclusive again. 
 

Yeah, if D2 is as expensive to keep going as some say, I could see Sony forcing it to shut down or scale back support until it just naturally dies. Then making Bungie’s next project, either Marathon or a single player FPS a Sony exclusive. 

[Commissar SFLUFAN]

I can give you nearly $4 billion worth of reasons as to why the notion that Sony doesn't already have "complete control" over Bungie is an illusion.

[crispy4000]

10 minutes ago, Spawn_of_Apathy said:

Sony barely supports PC and who knows if the new PlayStation CEO will even see it as viable. 2+ years for just some of their games. And that may end if PlayStation leadership decides they won’t get more console sales being 100% exclusive again. 

That ship has already sailed.

 

Sony confirms more PC ports are coming, because it's making a ton of money | PC Gamer

WWW.PCGAMER.COM

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Sony reaffirmed that it will continue to release first-party games on PC, and it's not hard to see why.

It’s viable.  They’re having their cake and eating it too with the staggered release schedule of single player stuff.

[crispy4000]

7 minutes ago, Commissar SFLUFAN said:

I can give you nearly $4 billion worth of reasons as to why the notion that Sony doesn't already have "complete control" over Bungie is an illusion.

8% of their (now former) workforce may see it differently.

[Commissar SFLUFAN]

1 minute ago, crispy4000 said:

8% of their (now former) workforce may see it differently.

 

There's really little doubt in my mind that Sony mandated cost-cutting at Bungie, but probably didn't provide specific guidance as to how it could be achieved.

 

Though anyone with an ounce of business acumen would know exactly what that type of expense reduction would entail.

[crispy4000]

20 minutes ago, Commissar SFLUFAN said:

 

There's really little doubt in my mind that Sony mandated cost-cutting at Bungie, but probably didn't provide specific guidance as to how it could be achieved.

If that’s true, it’s not what is being reported.  

[Paperclyp]

3 hours ago, AbsolutSurgen said:

 

Halo was a very good game, however I don't really understand putting it on a pedestal.  There were other great shooters before it (i.e. Half Life, Quake 3, etc.) that, on the whole, were better games.  They DID figure out how to finally get decent FPS controls on a controller -- but those controls are still far inferior to KB/Mouse.

Oh I don’t know about this. I think it absolutely deserves to be put on a pedestal. Not only were they good controls, but the game played super well both for single player and multiplayer. Controls aside, there had been nothing as ambitious from an FPS standpoint on a home console before Halo, and in a lot of ways the game was just as good if not better than the ones you mentioned. Some of it is certainly personal preference, but I think you’re selling it short. 
 

I always loved the enemy AI and uniqueness between enemy types, the polish of the games, the smoothness, they way they chose to balance the gunfights with your shields for like one on one encounters with other players, not to mention all the stuff going on that was like, more technical, like good online for its day, LAN play, customization / level creation and stuff like that.