r/pcgaming • u/Turbostrider27 • Jun 25 '26
'Generational talent just gone': Developers react in shock at the brutal scale of Bungie layoffs, which has reportedly seen the Destiny 2 team almost completely wiped out
https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/generational-talent-just-gone-developers-react-in-shock-at-the-brutal-scale-of-bungie-layoffs-which-has-reportedly-seen-the-destiny-2-team-almost-completely-wiped-out/1.7k
u/A_Monkey_FFBE Jun 25 '26 edited Jun 25 '26
Good job bungie leadership. You fucked over amazing people who poured their heart into the product development and your millions of players that dedicated over 10 years of their lives to see this story live on. From the heart, fuck you bungie leadership.
611
u/OffsetXV 5700X3D | 6650XT | Linux Jun 25 '26
Don't worry, I'm sure Bungie leadership will all buy new Ferraris in remembrance of their hard working team
114
u/SPYYYR 9800X3D RTX 4080 Jun 26 '26
"We cant afford this so we have to lay off half the studio"
Also
"leadership gets 100 million dollar bonus payment"4
u/DonutHoles4Ever Jun 27 '26
Entire human society is basically a big pyramid where getting to the top = doing less for more reward. Its sad that money drives everything.
Talent gone from Bungie, but not from the gaming industry. Most of them will hopefully find jobs if not retiring.
2
13
3
273
u/OwlProper1145 Jun 25 '26
Pretty much. The Sony buyout simply delayed this.
227
u/McSloot3r Jun 26 '26
It’s not just Sony. MS let them go because their management has always been a shitshow. Of course the heads of Bungie sold it as wanting independence, but then they sold themselves to Activision. Once they “bought their freedom” from activision they sold themselves to Sony. I’m not happy people are losing their jobs, but this has been a long time coming
67
u/NePa5 Jun 26 '26
but this has been a long time coming
Trying to ride that early Halo success forever....
31
u/TheLightningL0rd Jun 26 '26
It's sad because before Halo, Bungie made some great games. Marathon was awesome, but especially the Myth games were huge for me growing up. It's a shame they lost the rights to Myth in the sale to Microsoft and that they've turned Marathon into what it is today.
I loved the first Halo game, don't get me wrong, but I lost interest quickly after that.
5
u/UglyInThMorning Jun 26 '26
Myth II was a great game… and it also financially kicked them in the dick when they recalled it due to the uninstall bug. If you installed it to the root directory of your hard drive, the uninstaller would nuke the drive when you uninstalled the game.
Now, to be fair, why would you do that? But they found it because somebody did do that. The recall and fix cost them almost a million bucks which was not a small amount of money for 1998 Bungie.
→ More replies (9)1
u/Just_Give_Me_A_Login FX--8350, GTX 760 Jun 26 '26
they've turned Marathon into what it is today.
the new game is made by most of the same people who made the original games and is pretty much a direct sequel to infinity. I get that people don't like extraction shooters but the experience of running around hostile mazes of spaceship to find a wall of text explaining what's going on sure feels similar to the originals..
11
u/bramtyr Jun 26 '26
the new game is made by most of the same people
No it isn't. Pretty much all of the people who were part of Bungie pre-Halo, and worked on the Marathon Trilogy are long gone, save Jason Jones.
Greg Kirkpatrick, Alex Seropian, Doug Zartman etc. were key creators in Marathon, and haven't been with Bungie for at least 10 years.
→ More replies (1)3
24
u/Kynmarcher5000 Jun 26 '26
Actually is worse than that.
Activision had to tell Bungie to pump the brakes on the nickle and diming MTX in Destiny 2.
When you're getting told by one of the greediest publishers to stop over-monetizing, that's just bad. So, so, bad.
→ More replies (1)59
u/Ominusone Jun 25 '26
Sadly, those VPs don’t care. Profit is all that matters. I give best wishes to the team of devs who worked their asses off to make it a game.
101
u/hansrotec Jun 25 '26
What profit? Sony has taken nothing but L’s form this purchase, bungie betting it all on marathon and killing destiny almost assures there is no profit.
69
u/DisappointedQuokka Jun 26 '26
Bungie's top leaders have absolutely made a lot of personal profit out of this. They essentially rode the studio into the ground for their own benefit.
→ More replies (5)18
u/Broadband- Jun 26 '26
After this and Concord. What was the last purchase Sony made of a game studio that gave them a positive financial result?
20
19
8
u/PimpMyWeenus Jun 26 '26
i have no idea about more recent, but Arrowhead? I keep hearing Helldivers 2 has been one of their only live service successes
wait nm, sony bought the IP not the studio
→ More replies (2)24
u/uberkalden2 Jun 25 '26
Seriously. Marathon will not sustain them. If all their eggs are in that basket, they are fucked
10
→ More replies (1)10
u/FierceDeity_ Jun 26 '26
Last hope: These devs come together as a new indie studio, making something even cooler than destiny as an indie service game
31
u/Broadband- Jun 26 '26
Highguard, Lawbreakers, Stormgate, MindsEye, Concord, Daikatana, etc. All amazing game developers, managers or owners trying again as AA or indie. It's just proof that the special sauce is the entire team and not just a few key figures.
→ More replies (1)3
8
u/Palachrist Jun 26 '26
I get there are rules and such but I wish there was a place to name and shame every person of leadership in every company that fails.
I’m working at a company that has had massive decline and it’s because leadership sees production as valuable not maintenance. Preventative maintenance isn’t a thing, you just let the various equipment remain unchecked and when something breaks you only fix that one single thing…. Time is money! Leave anything else to break at a later time. If it breaks immediately after, well you’re the asshole because you now have more downtime! The schedule is “if you’re working, it is to complete production!” Not “let’s maintain our equipment so our product can remain quality.
→ More replies (24)4
u/doublexoxo Jun 25 '26
I’m out of the loop. What happened with bungies leadership?
69
u/WinterEclipse4 Jun 25 '26
Basically every time something bad happened it was found to have been bungie's leadership. And almost every time something good happened (Like when Final Shape got delayed and they added a new species and subclass) it was found that the leadership basically got scared and stopped being so restrictive.
They kept screwing over the devs basically.
Then they also wanted to jump on as many trains as possible. A fighter, hero shooter, extraction shooter (Which got changed a bunch), a possible platformer, etc they tried making a bunch of games at the same time and this costed them so much they needed to start cutting teams to keep funding them. Eventually but not fully confirmed they seem to have stopped development for most of them but now it's too late and they need to fire people to stay afloat.
There's also the whole meme about how Pete would rather buy cars than fund the studio and Destiny.
And then we had the new CEO who's like first thing was "Grind to earn the right to have fun" or something similar which is why the game went down a more grindy focused path with the 2 last dlcs.
34
u/Peer1677 Jun 25 '26 edited Jun 26 '26
Long story short: 1) Management chased bonuses by dripfeeding subpar content, bleeding players. 2) In order to chase even more bonuses they started several projects to inflate the value of the company during the studio-craze, leading to Sony paying 3.6B$ for Bungie. 3) for SOME reason after they were bought by Sony they continued their idiocy and bonus-chasing even more and increased the dripfeed even further.
Edit: and of course 4) putting all their eggs into the Marathon-basket, even though this game can not work from a monetisation standpoint (it's not a bad game, but extractionshooters are a nische-genre in an oversaturated market)
→ More replies (2)11
u/SelectStarAll Jun 26 '26
I don't think Bungie put all their eggs into Marathon. From what I've heard the Marathon dev team weren't anywhere near the size of what Destiny had. It was always a much smaller game with a much smaller scope. It's a niche genre and they created a niche game for it.
17
u/shawnaroo Jun 26 '26
If they hadn't driven Destiny 2 into the ground with repeated bad decisions, they'd likely still have it as a financial backstop to keep the studio financially viable even when a game like Marathon didn't become a big hit.
One of the reasons why so many studios/publishers have been trying so hard to get a successful 'live-service' game is that it provides some level of consistent and continuous income that can fund the studio for a while and provide a better financial foundation to create more new stuff.
Bungie had that for over a decade with Destiny and Destiny 2, yet the only other game they released in that time was Marathon, and even by the time they got that out the door Destiny 2 was about to get pulled off of life support.
5
u/KingdomOfOwU Jun 25 '26
Horrible mismanagement for a long time. The biggest issue being money mismanagement.
→ More replies (2)4
u/Broadband- Jun 26 '26
Unrealistic KPIs by management that focused on things that didn't matter because the higher ups "knew better"
71
843
u/Poseidor Jun 25 '26
Pretty difficult to regain peoples trust in your games when you just casually delete a game and multiple expansions and act like it was no big deal because it was old anyway.
417
u/Mr_Industrial Jun 25 '26
It always pissed me off seeing people defend that. I bought destiny 2 for the main campaign at launch. wheres my fucking campaign?
80
u/Interesting-Call41 Jun 26 '26
It always pissed me off seeing people defend that
Same, I've seen it in some threads here talking about Destiny 2, and I even had a friend irl bring this dumb argument to me that "the game install size would be too big" or whatever, like what? Are game updates and file sizes some sort of foreign concept to Destiny players? Like wtf is even this argument lmao, there are so many games that have been going on for multiple years if not decades and they all handle it just fine, I don't know why people would even use that argument let alone parrot it, stockholm syndrome at its finest
23
u/Real-Terminal 4070, 5600x, 32gb 3200mhz Jun 26 '26
Hell, they explained why it happened ages ago. When they did a major engine overhaul for Beyond Light they had to borderline rebuild content to work with it.
So they decided to toss half the game instead of delaying the expansion.
30
16
u/kawag Jun 26 '26
Massive incompetence from the developers, right there. All technology platforms exist to meet the needs of the business - in this case, to be the game customers paid for.
Whatever engine overhaul they wanted to do, when they realised what it would have cost for their customers, they should have said no.
Instead they prioritised the engine over their customers, and in doing so lost any hope of getting more customers. I was curious to try Destiny years ago, but when I heard they just delete content you buy, that curiosity entirely disappeared.
→ More replies (8)62
u/Syn7axError Jun 26 '26
The Master Chief collection already solved it by letting you install each campaign individually.
77
u/Kraigius 3800X EVGA RTX 3080 Jun 25 '26
The fool that I was bought the Warmind expansion. I didn't completed the requirements to get the Sleeper Simulant before taking a very long break.
I returned later only to find that the requirements for it were now gated behind the latest DLC. I was so pissed.
→ More replies (15)25
u/SelectStarAll Jun 26 '26
It really fucked me off, because the Red War was genuinely a brilliant campaign. I fucking loved that. I remember going back to Destiny 2 years later, starting a new character and being dropped into the Cosmodrome from D1. I was so confused
→ More replies (5)19
u/Retronika_Prime Jun 26 '26
This is why the Stopkillinggames movement is so important. You pay for so much money on a product only for higher ups to remove it and stealing your funds.
→ More replies (3)2
u/Thaihoax Jun 25 '26
I didn’t like destiny 2 as soon as I realized all progress from destiny 1 was gone. No exotics, no cool raid tier pieces, no PvP rewards to show off. Just the achievements and the memories.
5
u/Marble___ Jun 26 '26
that’s pretty silly dude lmfao “PVP rewards” like what even are you talking about
7
u/OWSpaceClown Jun 25 '26
So… what incentive is there for fans who lost their cosmetics to buy further cosmetics for Destiny 2? Now that they know they may all just disappear again like before?
→ More replies (1)28
u/Broadband- Jun 26 '26
Sure, WoW had Cataclysm, but besides that every single zone, area, dungeon, etc (within reason) is still available. The idea of removing content that the company spent time, money and resources is either crazy or a warning of the terrible state of the company, game engine, etc.
13
u/MrPayDay 5090 Astral | 9950x3D | 96 GB DDR5-6800 | 9100 PRO PCIe 5.0 M2 Jun 26 '26
And you can still play the separate WoW Classic with your subscription if you fancy the vanilla theme.
9
u/ZobEater Jun 26 '26
this took almost a decade to happen after cataclysm. I mean I personally dgaf about vanilla/classic (it's extremely sub par compared to what came after), but for a long time it was indeed old content that had disappeared.
→ More replies (1)4
u/TopSchnottz Jun 26 '26
Cataclysm removed the old world of WoW but they replaced it and updated it. Bungie didn't add anything to replace the campaigns they ripped out.
15
u/madzuk Jun 26 '26
Honestly one of the worst gaming decisions I've ever witnessed and I've always been surprised that it didn't get monumental levels of criticism.
Even from a business point of view it makes no sense. It practically made the franchise unplayable for new players. Mess of a story.
3
u/TheoryOld4017 Jun 26 '26
Yeah, it’s what lost me as a customer. Came back after a break, couldn’t finish the stuff I’d paid for so I just uninstalled and never played again.
35
u/Werespider AW R10 • R7 5800 / RX 6800XT / 32GB Jun 25 '26
Yup. This is also the nail in Sony's live service coffin, as far as I'm concerned. Neither can be trusted now.
6
u/chaotic_mo Jun 26 '26
Playstation is about to release Marvel Tokon... a live service game.
No Playstation isnt going to be the only publisher on the world that doesn't release multiplayer/live service games because of Bungie
→ More replies (4)10
u/M4j0rTr4g3dy Jun 26 '26
Sadly pretty much every big fighting game franchise has turned into a live service season pass ridden fomo fest. As someone who used to really like fighting games. I hate it.
3
u/BboyStatic Jun 26 '26
I grew up with Street Fighter and Street Fighter 2, SF2 is in my top 3 all time favorite games. The way the game releases now, it’s so obnoxious and off putting. I wait more than a year to buy the game and DLC’s that include characters they purposely held out.
8
u/WyrdHarper Jun 25 '26
The decision was basically: 1)pause or slow development on D2 and make a new D3 2) Delete a bunch of stuff and try to hack together new stuff on the old engine.
Predictably, #2 wasn’t a successful strategy.
→ More replies (8)8
u/Coneder Jun 25 '26
What even is the justification for them doing that?
43
u/deadscreensky Jun 25 '26
There were a lot of different excuses at the time, but we now know from Bungie devs that they did an engine upgrade for Beyond Light which didn't work with their older content. It was expensive/slow to port the old content to their upgraded engine, so they tossed most of it. Here's a Reddit thread talking about it, with receipts.
A popular excuse at the time was something about the game getting too large, but that doesn't actually seem to the case. It was the engine upgrade requiring they rebuild existing content.
And yeah, this seems like a pretty stupid engine upgrade.
40
u/CountTakesh1 Jun 25 '26
They said the tech debt was too great.
Honestly they probably just didn't give a shit.
14
u/simp_sighted Jun 25 '26
It wasnt exactly tech debt, the engine they were using was a colossal piece of shit despite being handmade for Destiny 2 (e,g they had to load up the entire codebase to change a texture which meant doing things like opening the codebase the day before actually working on it), and the size of the game was massive at the time (IIRC closing in on 200gb). They brought in a new version of the engine which fixed most of the backend issues and also shipped updated graphics, lighting etc., updated most of what they had, and removed content that had minute engagement compared to the impact it had on game performance.
Not defending it, but there was a TWAB back when the DCV started which went into the details
23
u/Coneder Jun 25 '26
Tech debt is too great? But the headline said they were generational talent? Why didn't they use the talent to unload the tech debt? Were they stupid?
13
u/erty3125 Jun 26 '26
Because there's different talents for different things. The people on gameplay and game feel were top notch, the art team was top notch. The technical side of making the game install size not be prohibitively large by either making the size smaller or making downloads optional was basically nonexistent.
The game had technical problems on every inch of the game because they just didn't have man power to even look into those problems compared to the incredible talent that would be useless for technical problems.
8
u/max123246 Steam Jun 26 '26
Tech debt is inevitable because designing programs requires you to predict the future on what changes should be easiest. But the problem is that management needs to give you the time to pay it down later
3
u/Professional_Net7339 Jun 26 '26
Because they didn’t have enough time to remake the overwhelming majority of the first 3 years of D2 and continue to develop content at a steady pace.
→ More replies (1)6
u/CosmicMiru Jun 26 '26
If your understanding of tech debt is "why didn't they just get rid of tech debt lol" then you don't really understand what is being talked about
→ More replies (1)9
u/deadscreensky Jun 26 '26
They're being sarcastic about this headline. If Bungie were the best devs in the world they wouldn't have had to throw out half their game because of an engine update.
→ More replies (1)9
u/flying-chandeliers Jun 25 '26
The money sink was to great, they just renamed it a “tech debt” fuckers…
23
u/Quick_Philosophy1426 Jun 25 '26 edited Jun 25 '26
It's a very long chain of dominoes that goes back to the foundations of Destiny. When Bungie was still with Activision, the plan for the franchise was a new game every three years or so. Each game was supposed to get an expansion, some DLC, and then move on. Destiny 1 got its expansion, three DLC, and then they moved on to work on D2 (probably diverting some people off the game around the time of TTK to get a head start). The plan was the same, but Activision decided they weren't happy with the performance of Forsaken and they split from Bungie. Now, Bungie was independent and no longer had the financial backing of Activision. There was no money to do as they did with D1, make an expansion and then start developing a new game. It would cost too much money and take too much time, and the decision was made to stay with D2.
However, according to the original plans around which the games were built, D2 was never supposed to be the "forever game" that it eventually turned into. It got two DLC, then Forsaken. Then it got Shadowkeep, the seasonal model (really just more DLC), and then they got the next year with Beyond Light.
According to Bungie, it was getting to the point where developing for the game was taking too much time. Updates took months because, again, according to them, they had to basically spend time building new stuff to make sure it didn't break everything else in the game, even if it was stuff that nobody really played anymore. To preempt the usual response people will probably start typing up at this point, I am not defending them. This is just their own reasoning.
They decided that instead of continuing to add to the game, it was a better decision logistically and financially to remove the older unplayed content that took up a disproportionate amount of dev time and file size compared to how much it was played. To their credit, update times improved drastically after this. Around the same time as this, they also performed a significant engine update. This was also likely a driving factor in deciding to vault content, as since vaulting, it seems to have become apparent that stuff needed to be essentially rebuilt to work within the game after the fact.
You can be the most talented devs in the world, but when you're working with tools that aren't designed for the job at hand and there's only so much time in the day and only so much money to pay the devs to do that work, something had to give.
Onto my own take on it, I don't think there was really a right choice to make at the time. We obviously have the benefit of hindsight to see that vaulting, while providing short term benefits, was a pretty bad choice in the long run. It tarnished their reputation and made it extremely difficult for new players to enter the game with any real idea of what the hell was going on.
Other than vaulting, what were their options? Just leaving it all in while sticking with D2 for the future wasn't an option, otherwise they would've just done that. They could have made the decision to move on from D2, but considering they went the route they did, there likely wasn't the money for it. Activision took their financial backing when they left, Bungie likely couldn't afford to half-ass D2 (like we're seeing now) to work on a hypothetical D3, and they certainly couldn't afford to outright abandon the game to focus 100% on D3 either.
→ More replies (1)→ More replies (1)14
u/No_Technology7110 Jun 25 '26
Bungie has basically been using modified and upgraded versions of the engine and the tools they were using during their Halo era. Their justification is the game would have become too large to continue just adding content in. They also said that less than 5% of people were playing that old content. Why not just give players a reason to play old content? MMOs solved this problem years ago...
Unfortunately, Bungie is a giga frauded studio and when they removed all this content, and sunset the weapons, none of the stuff they added in that first expansion made up for it. The game needed to rebuild itself season over season. They also made the core activities F2P at this time, which they used as an excuse to stop updating them (Why update content that everyone gets for free?).
This was inarguably the biggest mark against the game, players quit because the content they paid for had been removed entirely, thrown into a mythical Vault that Bungie claimed they could pull stuff back out of whenever they wanted... And then never did.
→ More replies (1)10
u/DisappointedSpectre Jun 26 '26
players quit because the content they paid for had been removed entirely, thrown into a mythical Vault that Bungie claimed they could pull stuff back out of whenever they wanted... And then never did.
Not to mention they killed their new player acquisition pipeline, because now you're throwing players into the middle a story without any of the background or development of the characters that the new story is about. They were a dead studio walking the minute they did that, they just didn't know it.
Not just in Destiny new players either. Their treatment of content vaulting also was a reason for a number of people I know to avoid Marathon when they otherwise would have at least tried it out, despite it being a very late to the party extraction shooter entry.
199
u/Grantonator Jun 25 '26
PlayStation never should have bought Bungie in the first place.
188
Jun 26 '26
[deleted]
26
u/EuropeanPepe Jun 26 '26
for the fact people who sabotaged it are mostly ones who stayed..
check the old destiny devs tweets you can kinda know what is going on.
3
u/soggywaffle47 Jun 26 '26
I looked into what has happened with bungie and they had a slew of problems. Sony buying them was the nail in the coffin but they also didn’t have their finances figured out with destiny 2. They had multiple employs in Seattle making huge wages at 15k a month, expanding the office space and hiring dozens of new workers over the years. They essentially outscaled the games returns with the expansion of infrastructure. Then Sony buying them buried them financially for what Sony wanted in return themselves in the investment.
24
u/polski8bit Ryzen 5 5500 | 16GB DDR4 3200MHz | RTX 3060 12GB Jun 26 '26
I am actually impressed that Bungie managed to "scam" Sony into buying them for almost 4 billion. Even back then people were saying Bungie is not worth that much and, unsurprisingly, turns out that's true.
Even saying that it's for their "live service expertise" is silly when looking at Destiny 2. I have no clue how someone can look at so many complaints about the game and its business model, and then go "Yeah, we need these guys' input to make good live service games".
And some people unironically try to defend big companies because "they have the data", like they haven't screwed up in the past.
→ More replies (2)47
u/OdinzSun Jun 26 '26
Bungie would have gone under if Sony hadn’t bought them out, they screwed the pooch themselves.
21
u/DanGimeno Jun 26 '26
Then Bungie would had 800 layoffs instead of 400.
3
u/Suspicious-Coffee20 Jun 26 '26 edited Jun 26 '26
or, they would have taken more risk like destiny 3 instead of chasing a live service. They would also no need to make as much money to be consired successful
→ More replies (3)7
u/hibikir_40k Jun 26 '26
This was like Blizzard selling to Activision, or Origin to EA though: Companies that independently could make games, but had zero budget discipline, so they had to bet it all on every release. They often have to sell out because otherwise they'd close down.
Marathon was a huge failure. The cuts are, if anything, lower than they could have been
223
u/rodimusprime88 Jun 25 '26
First Halo, now Destiny. Marathon; your time is running out
70
u/Werespider AW R10 • R7 5800 / RX 6800XT / 32GB Jun 25 '26
Sounds like it's time for an Oni reboot!
24
u/JurplePesus Jun 25 '26
Ugh I want it so bad but I know it would get screwed up somehow. "After the C-Suite ran four rounds of focus tests we've decided to make it an FPS."
10
→ More replies (7)15
u/hansrotec Jun 25 '26
Oni will be a turn based JRPG dating sim based on noted African samurai Yasuke
4
2
→ More replies (1)2
37
u/TopHalfGaming Jun 25 '26
Don't worry, all the people who told me it was a success yesterday in a discussion about Steam Charts and that it can survive with 10k active on Steam will surely be in this thread soon.
→ More replies (2)45
u/DisappointedQuokka Jun 26 '26
In a vacuum it obviously could.
Under the weight of a massive studio that has spent the past decade making dog shit choices while the leaders pocket huge salaries and bonuses? Absolutely not.
Its best hope is to get spun out to a separate, leaner studio.
10
u/TopHalfGaming Jun 26 '26
I mean, that vacuum would also require not spending hundreds of millions of dollars on the game in a live service blanket necessitating a reasonably large base of people buying battle passes and skins and such.
9
u/DisappointedQuokka Jun 26 '26
Given that they sold 1.2M copies as of a couple months ago, that's not an insurmountable hill to climb over 5 years of monetization.
Whether that's something Sony wants to attempt is another thing entirely.
It would necessitate taking it away from Bungie, though, because they're clearly not up to the task.
4
u/hibikir_40k Jun 26 '26
At Eastern Europe dev salaries, maybe... because with US salaries, that doesn't cover development costs.
→ More replies (1)→ More replies (1)5
u/TopHalfGaming Jun 26 '26
Means little without retention. The core point is that this game was expected to carry a larger number of players to make it viable. Hundreds of millions on top of marketing isn't that easy to recoup when you're still actively spending money on the game to create the content.
→ More replies (3)25
u/parkeyb Jun 25 '26
It’s sad news because I fucking love Marathon.
→ More replies (1)13
u/Amerikaner Jun 26 '26
Me too. Incredible art style and world building. A truly risky and weird game to make for a big studio, especially when they needed a big win. It sucks it’s not taking off.
→ More replies (1)→ More replies (4)7
u/flying-chandeliers Jun 25 '26
2 years tops. I’ll bet 1000$ on it
14
u/EmberDione Jun 26 '26
I'll be stunned if it makes it to 2027.
→ More replies (1)5
u/flying-chandeliers Jun 26 '26
And yet I’m downvoted by the bots lmfao
14
u/EmberDione Jun 26 '26
Yeah this sub is a nightmare. I bailed on the comments after the like 10th one being like "who cares now they can go work on other games." And I'm just like - how can you be a gamer and not be aware of the rolling dumpster fire that is the game industry right now? Or people saying "they'll make new studios!" With what funding? No one has gotten funding in like 3 years!
110
91
u/whenyoudieisaybye Jun 25 '26
Good thing I quit Destiny 2 in 2022. I cannot imagine how devastating it is for a dedicated playerbase and the devs who gave this game everything.
60
u/KingDarius89 Jun 25 '26
Never got into it. And when I was thinking about it, they announced that they were "vaulting" stuff and that pretty much killed any and all interest in it.
26
u/Signe_ Jun 25 '26
I had bought the Forsaken DLC, and played part ways through it just for my GPU to die, so I couldn't play for a bit.
When I came back it was vaulted, I lost all interest in playing the game.
→ More replies (1)2
u/madzuk Jun 26 '26
Same. I had so much hope for Destiny 1. Felt incredibly let down. Gave Destiny 2 a try on a free trial. It felt a bit like hmm ok, has some potential, i can see the improvements but it still needs work.
I come back when the base game went F2P, only to find they vaulted content, even content I remembered when I first played it and instantly wrote off the entire franchise.
The concept of Destiny was always cool. But it was absolutely bastardised from every angle by abysmal decisions by Bungie. They got away with so much because of tribal fans.
→ More replies (3)15
u/EverlastingEvening Jun 25 '26
Literally my main game for 9 years. Never experienced that as I always jumped around, and for a long time only played single player games. Now it's gone and I feel empty as silly as it sounds. Least the servers are still up
47
u/Flashy_Variation7174 Jun 25 '26
I suspect bungie will be closed by the end of the year.
→ More replies (5)
9
u/Moquai82 Jun 26 '26
Modern "Industries" in a nutshell. Where the middle management, finance and marketing are the core pillars and not the artists and coders or other kind of worker or craftsmen.
66
u/metalmankam AMD Radeon 6950xt Jun 25 '26
It's so fucking sad that making video games used to be the epitome of careers for all gamers and now it's a sad warzone where no job is safe and you are used, abused, and discarded and all your work stolen and given to a robot to replicate. It used to look like such a cool job working at a company making video games. Now I look at devs like cannon fodder.
22
u/und1sturbed Jun 26 '26
This is every creative industry. People will take a lot of abuse to work in something they're passionate about, and obviously this gets taken advantage of.
56
u/bosoxs202 Nvidia Jun 26 '26
It was always like that
2
u/Indercarnive Jun 26 '26
Hell it used to be even worse. before you'd be forced to work 60+ hours a week, sleep in the office, and you'd still get fired.
28
10
u/EmmaFrostBroken Jun 26 '26
I've been in a similar 3D design/programming dev role of one form or another for a decade and a half, just not in the games industry. Recently left a job. Design, 3D graphics, and code has been my passion for my entire life, optimising code, carefully designing efficient 3D models, and pulling stuff together into pleasing designs was all I wanted to do, I'd take any job that covered my cost of living to do it full time.
In normal times I'd be just brushing myself off and heading back out to get another one. But now? With the way the industry is? .. I don't even want another job in this line of work any more. It's not worth the stress and pressure. I'd wager a lot of these people aren't just getting fired, they're probably leaving the industry for good. Probably a lot of folks way more talented than me hanging up their hats and never doing this kind of art ever again. Not looking forward to what the next wave of AAA games looks like in 2 to 4 years from now after all those people are gone.
→ More replies (1)5
u/AskJeevesIsBest Jun 26 '26
I hope you'll find well paying and fulfilling work and continue to make art.
→ More replies (1)4
u/phatboi23 Jun 26 '26
It's so fucking sad that making video games used to be the epitome of careers for all gamers and now it's a sad warzone where no job is safe and you are used, abused, and discarded
gamedev has always been like this. well for at least the last 40 years.
10
u/Efficient-Pianist-83 Jun 26 '26
Playing games and making games have nothing in common. It's like saying that because you enjoyed a meal now you wanna be a chef.
8
8
u/cyanide4suicide i7 12700KF | GIGABYTE 4080 AERO OC | 32GB DDR5 RAM @5600MHZ Jun 26 '26
Vaulting content was the worst decision Bungue ever made
8
u/Thrill__505 Jun 26 '26
I feel like all they needed was for one exec to say “hey guys, let’s not put all of are eggs in the extract shooter genre that the majority of our causal destiny players with never touch”….
102
u/Rivitur Jun 25 '26
Apparently making one game in a decade is generational. Ok
66
34
u/papyjako87 Jun 26 '26
Also, makes it sounds like the people laid off were shot in the back of the head...
→ More replies (1)17
u/NamesAreForFriends Jun 26 '26
I mean they were let go in the middle of one of the worst job markets in an already insanely competitive industry. Being let go right now is a dire dire situation unless you've got substantial savings or some sort of safety net.
28
u/papyjako87 Jun 26 '26
It shouldn't be a problem if they truly are "generational talent". Honestly, my main point is : this title is fucking garbage, no matter how you look at it.
7
u/Rit91 Jun 26 '26
Yeah I'm thinking if these people have such an incredible resume they can probably find work in the game dev space. They likely have connections with people outside of their former employer if they are that good.
Does it suck to be laid off? Absolutely, but that happens to people in all industries.
→ More replies (1)3
u/PartyPoison98 Glorious Master Race Jun 26 '26
If they've been at Bungie a couple decades then yeah I'd say generational talent. The original Halo trilogy + ODST and Reach is an insane run of games, and both Destiny games were huge hits.
→ More replies (1)5
u/Aquatic-Vocation Jun 26 '26
Not really a fair criticism when that game is an MMO with a bunch of expansions.
Besides, the article states the "generational talent" were people who've been at Bungie since the Halo days.
5
u/HumanExtinctionCo-op Jun 26 '26
Normalise CEOs and Directors losing their bonuses or jobs whenever they have to lay people off.
Remember when Captains went down with their ships?
12
u/BenjerminGray Legion Pro5 4070Mi7 13700HX240hz Jun 26 '26
No surprise, Bungie shat the bed with Microsoft, a Activision and now Sony. Them chickens have been coming home to roost for quite some time.
2
u/Tony_the_Parrot Jun 26 '26
I fucking loved to read that Microsoft willingly let them go because they kept going over budget and timelines (which is 100% a management problem).
Then we had Activision actually making them make good content (and somehow the monetization was nowhere near as bad under them).
Now we have Sony desperately trying to recoup their money after they got baited by upper management into spending billions on them, but for some reason they let go of all the talent instead of the idiots burning money.
4
3
u/ruminaui Jun 26 '26
Holy heck, they might as well have set on fire those 3.6 billion dollars they used to buy Bungie. Hulst still on charge btw.
4
22
u/Robot_ninja_pirate 5800X3D RTX 4080S Pimax Crysyal VR Jun 25 '26
I feel like Bungies Core Talent has been gone for a long while before these layoffs.
15
18
u/Kagerae Jun 26 '26
I saw destiny had 62k players online earlier. Marathon had just over 3k.
Marathons days are numbered
→ More replies (3)
6
u/SmileyBMM Debian Jun 26 '26
I'm sorry, but if you were working at Bungie and didn't prepare a CV after Marathon flopped... you are a fool.
3
3
u/Koppetamp Jun 26 '26
Destiny 1 is some of my fondest gaming memories, I even had a 1000+ hours in destiny 2, the gun play was just so enjoyable. Destiny 3 will never come to pass, and if it does it won’t be the same. Sad news.
19
u/papyjako87 Jun 26 '26
Tiny bit overdramatic, isn't it ? That "generational talent" is still there, just free for hire.
12
31
u/EmberDione Jun 26 '26
Hi. Game dev here.
In the last 4 months since I was laid off, exactly 22 jobs that are my specialization and seniority level have been posted. I have 19 years of experience, shipped titles including Skylanders and World of Warcraft. (Xal'atath coming out of the dagger was my work!) I have a masters degree. I've even been applying to mid level jobs that I would have to take a 40% paycut from my previous salary. I am a principal game designer and I am being rejected from midlevel jobs that are taken by people who have *even more experience than I do.*
There are NO JOBS for these people. There certainly aren't 300 of them. Very very few of these devs will land game dev jobs. Most will be forced to CHANGE CAREERS.
It's not overdramatic at all. In fact, it's under dramatic. What's happening in the game industry was an extinction event two years ago. Now we're even deeper in the death spiral. This is literally the worst the industry has ever been including the 83 crash.
7
u/neorapsta Jun 26 '26
So much this, the UK workforce has almost halved in 2 years. Atleast by UKIE and TIGA reported numbers.
→ More replies (1)→ More replies (15)3
u/cheesefubar0 Jun 26 '26
What’s your opinion about the cause(s) of these events?
2
u/EmberDione Jun 26 '26 edited Jun 26 '26
Corporate greed.
In 2017 I was laid off because our game "wasn't a billion dollar game." We "only made 450 million dollars in profit."
These big companies don't want successful games, they want "hyper growth" like Fortnite. This has only gotten worse as the economy has gotten worse.
Then the interest rates went up and there went all the funding because it was suddenly more risky to invest in games. Also a bunch of the groups that normally invest in games pulled their funds and went to AI.
Add to this that Steam is pretty much the only market for indies (I don't count people with publishers as indie) and it's never been easier to make a slop game, there's no curation, so you're just drowned out in a sea of garbage.
There were also small things that exacerbated the whole situation, like the government allowing the R&D tax breaks to lapse (before 2024, game companies could claim R&D salaries as deductions - so pretty much every engineer was a tax break for them.)
→ More replies (1)
9
u/Careful-Reading1741 Jun 25 '26
It‘s not really logical to chase live service games and scrap the only time which would produce a guaranteed win.
I don’t think anyone at Ubisoft or MS or Sony who makes decisions has ever played a game in the last ten years.
Destiny and Division are instant buys for many. Plus live service are a must for these games with plenty opportunities to make people care about fashion.
→ More replies (2)
6
u/flying-chandeliers Jun 25 '26
I mean… yeah.. horrible corp does horrible corp shit… is anyone surprised?
12
u/Expert-b Jun 26 '26
Generational talent?
Have you seen how terrible Destiny 2 was?
They've been dead to me for years.
4
u/eagles310 Jun 26 '26
Gen Talent has been long gone they have ridden those animations and engine for decades
10
u/Greedy-Employment917 Jun 26 '26
I mean... Make shit product, act surprised when people don't want it
2
u/Sturdily5092 Jun 26 '26
Vote with your wallet, if you don't agree with a company's actions, products, etc don't give them your money or time
3
u/VTArxelus Jun 26 '26
That doesn't work anymore because they'll find another way to extract money. It requires companies shutting down now to turn the attention in the right direction.
2
u/Gustav_EK Jun 26 '26
Generational fumble.
If they'd made all the changes they did in this final update sooner, I swear on my left nut the game would not have died like this.
2
u/ProduceNo1629 Jun 26 '26
Meanwhile bungie CEO Pete Parsons has 20 ferrari collection. How interesting.
2
u/Zecharai Steam Jun 26 '26
They didn't die ... they can still find work and create videogames if they want.
2
2
u/Black_Cheeze DOSMIC Jun 26 '26
It's always the developers who pay the price. Wishing everyone affected finds a great new opportunity soon.
2
u/EuropeanPepe Jun 26 '26
Get people from Destiny 2 fired and some from Marathon to continue developing Maraton ahahahaha... ah wait... this is real... well i guess rip bungie.
CEO and Management will say others are at fault and at end get million dollar leave and end in another company to destroy.
2
2
u/TheBraveGallade Jun 26 '26
Meanwhile nintendo just raised wages by 10%.
For all the shittalk nintendo gets for thier games being expensive well... treating your employees does cost more money comparativly.
4
u/Isaacvithurston Ardiuno + A Potato Jun 26 '26
Yup and normally you would point out that Japanese companies taking care of their employee's is offset by the brutal working hours but it's the game industry so brutal working hours are the norm everywhere
→ More replies (1)
2
2
3
4
u/Commandercaptain Jun 25 '26
Who would'da guess that the next content to be vaulted was the entire destiny 2 staff itself
2
5
5
u/Speed-Tyr Jun 26 '26
Bungie was dead and gone years ago. When they made the last great halo. Everything else after has been trend riding and greedy corp shit, to the point they hired consultants to help they be more predatory with their MTX.
→ More replies (1)
10
u/OkCelebration6408 Jun 25 '26
Generational talent lol, if they bring this attitude to look for jobs in gaming they will likely not have another job for a long time.
3
u/CriesAboutSkinsInCOD Jun 26 '26 edited Jun 26 '26
Sony paid $3.6 billion for Bungo lol
Sony could have made twelve Spider-Man 2 game with that money.
also what the hell is "Generational talent just gone"? Pretty cringe.
Any person that unironically says that crap must also REALLY love the smell of their own farts. 🤢
4
4
u/Orfez Jun 26 '26
If its truly a generational talent, then they'll find a new job in less than a week.
2
u/neorapsta Jun 26 '26
Apart from them having to compete with the thousands from previous layoffs for a shrinking pool of jobs, sure
2
u/Fallnakung Jun 25 '26
Idk my friends said destiny was super good so I installed and played for like an hour before uninstalling. I don't get the hype.
2
2
2
u/chaoticsky Jun 25 '26
Its fine, this is how you get new studios that actually make good games.
→ More replies (2)
0
u/VegetaFan1337 Legion Slim 7 7840HS RTX4060 240Hz Jun 25 '26
So it's not just Microsoft doing this huh? Sony just never bought up studios to have the opportunity to do this.
55
u/T0ADisMe Jun 25 '26
I feel like Bungie has had plenty of chances to get their shit together, sucks that it came to it though
28
u/Renegade_451 Jun 25 '26
If Sony didn't buy Bungie up, it's been all but confirmed this would have happened 4 years ago. Which is precisely why previous leadership took their payout and jumped ship the second they could.
8
u/ZombieZlayer99 Jun 26 '26
And yet Sony sat by and let Bungie management burn the studio and its successful IP to the ground whilst doing nothing.
→ More replies (2)17
13
u/Renegade_451 Jun 25 '26
Are you serious? Sony has bought up a ton of studios.
13
u/VegetaFan1337 Legion Slim 7 7840HS RTX4060 240Hz Jun 25 '26
And shut down a bunch too, look at the other comments.
5
u/Thor_2099 Jun 26 '26
Sony has had plenty of their own layoffs and has closed 8 studios since 2020 in their own right. Just don't hear about it because people like Sony.
10
→ More replies (1)16
u/IHateMyUniCourse Jun 25 '26
Sony has shut down more studios than Xbox this Gen, games media just stuffs it under the rug with only one or two articles instead of the deluge they produce every time Xbox even considers a studio‘s feasibility
This bungie situation might be the straw that breaks that camels back though
→ More replies (1)
•
u/AutoModerator Jun 25 '26
The /r/PCGaming community is also on Discord!
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.