The layoff wave hit Bungie

This is notable for a number of reasons including that Sony promised no layoffs when buying the studio. Then again Sony is laying off a ton of people so this may not be acquisition related.

I've kind of hated Bungie since I played Destiny 1 and really hated how everything in that game was handled except the gameplay itself (the lore cards you had to read out of game REALLY rubbed me the wrong way) but obviously I don't want anyone to lose their jobs.

I think this says something about Sony's views on live service games, which they said they were betting huge on recently and which they acquired Bungie to shepherd but also it's just a "good" time to lay people off because that's the industry trend so each layoff gets less attention and does less reputational damage. It sucks.

Regardless, things seem grim in the gaming industry as a business right now, and at Sony in particular, even if there's no clear explanation as to why, since Spider-Man 2 is doing great and PS5 is selling very well.

Grim in that thousands of people are losing jobs, but I don't think anyone making the decisions cares enough for it to speak much for the health of the business. It's just "business as usual" to them. I think a lot of the talk of "wanting to be lean and flexible" around layoffs is code for "we don't know what trend to chase right now". Microtransactions and live services seem to have hit their peak, NFTs and the metaverse went absolutely nowhere, and it turns out you can't just "make a Fortnite happen". So we cut people now, wait for the next trend, and hire up then so we can try and catch that fad before it fizzles. Again, grim in that workers are being sacrificed to catch a wave, but I doubt the people running things think so.

@brian_: You may be right, Bri-guy, but, like, single player AAA games still seem to be making money if they're good. Spider-Man 2 and Mario launched huge. Starfield seems to have launched big.

Bungie made Halo and that series did pretty well for a time. Destiny has good shooting play. Couldn't they just...make a good traditional first party game?

It's just very strange to lay people off when your core business model is doing fine and is profitable because you don't know what trend to chase.

It's like a winery whose wines are selling well and who is making a profit firing people because they don't know what new varietal to plant. Why not just make...more of the stuff that's doing well?

@bigsocrates: To be fair, those AAA single-player games usually cost a lot of money to make, and there's no guarantee you'll end up with a Spider-Man or Mario at the end of it. I also think there's probably just more money to be had from investors when you go to them with a trend to chase as opposed to telling them you're just going to make a regular ol' video game.

You do it because you're a big company that spends millions to hire someone like McKinsey. All so that you can have a smug, snot-nosed Yale grad with zero knowledge of your industry put together a 80-slide PowerPoint that amounts to "Cut costs. Sell more stuff."

@brian_: "More money from investors (or publishers)" makes sense when you're a small company trying to get funding for a game but not when you're Sony. Sony is publicly traded so isn't getting direct investment from PE and stock prices for a company the size of Sony don't tend to move on news like "Sony is making an NFT game" or whatever. Sony is too big a company and while PlayStation is a big part of their business it's not their whole business and individual games don't do much. Microsoft's stock price moved when it acquired Activision, but it takes a major play like that to affect the market for them.

Of course big layoffs can juice stock prices for dumb reasons, but that's not quite the same thing and I don't think these layoffs are big enough.

And yes it's absolutely true that AAA games are expensive and there's no guarantee of a big hit, but when you've got a company like Bungie with a proven track record and you have the institutional advantages Sony has (such as being able to sell on a platform with zero payment to the platform holder) they seem like a better bet than they are for most. You don't need to chase trends to make money. Sony has a strong track record of making money off non trend chasing games, and so did Bungie before it became the Destiny company.

@bigsocrates: Layoffs on a smaller scale (relatively speaking) won't affect Sony's stock price, but if you wanna be real cynical about it it means Bungie employees who got invested Sony stock as part of the purchase are now losing those stick options, probably so they can be redistributed among the top, and given how the work environment at Bungie seems to secretly be completely fucked..

This is a bad year for game developers

@cozmicaztaway: When do we get to a good year for game developers? Haha

@sethmode: okay, this is an ESPECIALLY bad year for game developers.

I'm still not sure if tripping out of the industry was good or not, but I ain't been sacked yet in the crummy world of business software...

According to Jason Schreier, this was mostly driven by Destiny falling under projections in the last year. Revenue down 45% and player population dropping.

To me, this can all be traced back to Destiny's horrible new player experience that has only been getting worse. Population for this type of game always hinges on the people that leave being replaced by new players. With Destiny, the attrition rate doesn't seem like it's too bad for a game that has been going this long, but the terrible onboarding process for new players is turning people away before they can become regular players.

It certainly doesn't help that most of the old campaigns that would be pretty good first impressions have been removed from the game. There is currently no story campaign available for free to play players. The way the game introduces the core mechanics and the general progression loop to first time players is bad enough, but not having a big cinematic story campaign to get free to play players interested in the universe is, quite frankly, idiotic. There are multiple campaigns just sitting in the garbage completely inaccessible, they really should put at least one in the game. Content vaulting was the worst thing to ever happen to Destiny.

@ll_exile_ll: My understanding is that the content vaulting is a direct result of their level building tools being terrible, which made it impossible for them to update the game if everything was in it. Regardless, it was always a bad and anti-consumer idea and the fact that they took content people paid for offline is flat out scummy. As someone who often plays games late and goes to random content years after it was "relevant" it definitely helped me feel like I made the right decision passing on Destiny 2.

I have sometimes wondered about Bungie's internal culture. It seems like nobody there with any influence represents the interests of anyone but hardcore Destiny players, which always seemed like a bad way to run things. Another example of this was their obstinate refusal to put matchmaking into raids for Destiny 1 for reasons that have never made sense. It just seems like a company that thinks players should have to do things its way rather than the other way around.

Nonetheless it sucks that frontline people who don't make these decisions got laid off because the game is faltering.

This is happening everywhere beyond the gaming industry. This is why you're having a lot of strikes this year, and its not ending anytime soon. The Auto Industry just settled their strike, but now the medical industry is close to going on strike, like the big pharmaceutical companies like CVS, and Walgreens (which I believe is already on strike). The problem is, a lot of these major corporations, and you may as well think of these AAA developers like corporations, are run by Psychopaths and Sociopaths. Now you might say this was always the case, but the difference between then and now, is that back then these people knew there were lines they couldn't cross without serious repercussions. Now those line are either very blurred or gone, and this is what we have going on now.

But don't worry, soon Ai will be running everything. Its already happening on Silicon Valley.

As far as Bungie goes. They have been dropping on the ball on Destiny 2 for a while, and this is coming from someone who is invested in the games. I've gotten all the expansions and followed the seasons. But Lightfall was a big disappointment, to the point like a lot of players don't even go to Nepture that much, unless they are trying to complete a challenge. And the game has been plagued with bugs, which hasn't happen in the past as much before the buyout happened.

I really appreciated Bungie for their development of the Halo series since the original Xbox era, and I do not want them to go down these days, so I'm unsure what their future is going to be like...