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Pete Parsons Tells Employees Bungie Kept the ‘Right People’ to Work on Destiny 2
31.10.2023 - 22:43 / ign.com
In an internal town hall meeting addressing a Monday round of layoffs that impacted multiple departments, Bungie CEO Pete Parsons allegedly told remaining employees that the company had kept “the right people” to continue work on Destiny 2.
Speaking to multiple current and recently laid off employees, IGN has confirmed reports that Bungie took responsibility for the layoffs, rather than laying them at the feet of parent company Sony. Parsons told employees that the layoffs were largely due to underperformance of Destiny 2 over the last year, as well as lower-than-expected preorders for upcoming expansion The Final Shape.
IGN can now independently confirm reports that The Final Shape has been delayed to June 2024, and Marathon has been internally delayed to 2025 after having been in development since 2019.
Employees were also told that Destiny 2 player sentiment was at an all-time low. Sources tell IGN that this issue had been flagged to leadership repeatedly for months prior to the layoffs, with employees begging for necessary changes to win players back.
One former Bungie employee recalled that they were repeatedly assured following the 2022 Sony acquisition of Bungie that there would be no layoffs, and cited an item from a Sony quarterly report that claimed $1.2 billion of the $4 billion acquisition was going explicitly toward staff retention. Multiple employees confirmed that money was distributed to employees who were fully vested, with money split into multiple payments over time and varying based on discipline and seniority.
Other employees also told IGN they felt especially frustrated with the layoffs given that the company had completed work on a brand new headquarters, more than double the size of its previous office and likely a pricey upgrade in Bellevue, Washington. [Note: The archived Bungie blog article was available this morning when we first drafted this piece, but as of 3:00pm PT today appeared to have been taken down.]
Parsons was criticized in some quarters for calling the layoffs a "sad day at Bungie" in a tweet which similarly angered several employees we spoke to.
Today is a sad day at Bungie as we say goodbye to colleagues who have all made a significant impact on our studio. What these exceptional individuals have contributed to our games and Bungie culture has been enormous and will continue to be a part of Bungie long into the future.
The exact number of those impacted is still nebulous, though some sources we spoke to suggested roughly around 100 employees, a number also reported by Bloomberg earlier today. Multiple employees claimed that internally, Bungie leadership has tried to obfuscate the numbers and departments of those impacted while discouraging employees from asking
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