A Studio Shattered: The Aftermath Of The Mass Bungie Layoffs

Destiny 2

Bungie

Once Destiny 2 announced it was ending development of live content, being put on a kind of maintenance mode that didn’t even include a skeleton team, the writing was on the wall. Bungie would be hit by layoffs, and, as early reporting indicated, the scale would be huge.

That is exactly what’s happened. On Thursday, Bungie was almost cut in half by Sony-led layoffs touching all pieces of the company and wiping out decades of history and mountains of talent. Here’s where things stand, even as more information is coming in:

• According to the official numbers filed in the WARN notice, at least 292 Bungie employees have been laid off. The cutoff date there is July 9.
• This includes the entire Destiny 2 team, barring perhaps one or two exceptions that may surface. Previously, some had already been moved over to Marathon, but that was not a part of what happened yesterday. “It’s everyone,” I was told yesterday by those witnessing events in real time.
• Additional layoffs affected at least some devs on Marathon, and some at SIE who were supporting Bungie.
• The layoffs also included contractors on both Destiny and Marathon, with the former being a somewhat chaotic situation in which those contractors were supposed to help test and implement the last hotfix for Destiny 2. It’s not clear if that hotfix is going out at all now. There may be no one left to finish it or push it live.
• What’s happened with the much-derided “leadership” at Bungie is somewhat of a tangled web. Justin Truman, the head of Bungie who replaced Pete Parsons, has stepped down. There are reports that Bungie co-founder Jason Jones has also departed. There is no word on Bungie OG Tyson Green, the all-but invisible director of Destiny 2. But these are not “layoffs” in the traditional sense, as many of the oldest and most key members of Bungie have Sony cash-out deals resulting from the sale of the studio that are vesting this month. We do not have an actual list of names and figures, but it stands to reason that has a lot to do with who has left, and why.

• Replacing Justin Truman as the new head of Bungie is Poria Torken, former VP of Operations and someone almost no Bungie fans have probably ever heard of. He is originally from Herman Hulst’s Guerrilla Games, but he has been with Bungie for a decade or so now. For what it’s worth, former Bungie community manager Liana Ruppert, who has torched much of leadership since her departure, calls him “a good man.”
• Marathon continues to…Marathon. There were some cuts here, but all indications are that director Joe Ziegler is still in place, and content plans march on. In the layoff notice, PlayStation head Herman Hulst said Marathon “remains an important part of our portfolio,” and they will continue to support it after the “strong foundation established in seasons 1 and 2.” Certainly a confusing sentiment as both the public and internal numbers would likely not describe “a strong foundation.”
• Another citation in the notice is that other Bungie projects in incubation are still years away. But incubation is not production, and last I checked, no projects have actually been greenlit. And the dream of Destiny 3 taking shape now is impossible, given the clearing out of the entire Destiny 2 team.

No good news, no silver lining other than the fact that well, the entire studio wasn’t shut down, at least. But this is far from the end of the Bungie saga, a studio now supported by a single, struggling game. Hopefully, things can get better from here, and those laid off can find new work quickly. I’ll continue to add to this report as more information comes in.

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