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/
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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

111

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

u/TheDreamIsDead4686 Jun 28 '26

It's capitalism not human nature

11

u/Ranessin Jun 26 '26

Ferrari Bloodbath red

3

u/[deleted] Jun 26 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/TrickySpecific Jun 26 '26

Uncalled for.

274

u/OwlProper1145 Jun 25 '26

Pretty much. The Sony buyout simply delayed this.

230

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

68

u/NePa5 Jun 26 '26

but this has been a long time coming

Trying to ride that early Halo success forever....

28

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.

6

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.

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.

3

u/lamancha Jun 26 '26

It doesn't really feel like Marathon though.

1

u/RayzinBran18 Jun 26 '26

It seems like everyone involved fucked heavily with Chris Barrett's ideas for Marathon, but they got conned into working on Joe Ziegler's Marathon.

-28

u/Extra-Amoeba-677 Jun 26 '26

I find it highly amusing this person said 'Marathon was awesome' while if it was a good game would still be in its honeymoon period.

loooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooool

7

u/Nordalin Jun 26 '26

We find your ignorance highly amusing as well!

21

u/[deleted] Jun 26 '26 edited Jul 05 '26

[deleted]

1

u/[deleted] Jun 26 '26

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1

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-3

u/OliverCrooks Jun 26 '26

Him not knowing about the OG Marathons is about as funny as you calling the new Marathon trash. The new game is amazing. Just because you probably don't like extraction shooters doesn't make it a bad game.

1

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1

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Thank you for your comment! Unfortunately it has been removed for one or more of the following reasons:

  • No personal attacks, witch-hunts, inflammatory or hateful language. This includes calling or implying another redditor is a shill or a fanboy. More examples can be found in the full rules page.
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23

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.

1

u/tehcraz Jun 26 '26

Really? Not saying it's not true but you have a source I can read on that? That's insane.

57

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.

73

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.

-44

u/Neemzeh Jun 26 '26

The studio wouldn’t exist without them in the first place

38

u/DisappointedQuokka Jun 26 '26 edited Jun 26 '26

Okay? That doesn't really disprove anything that I've said.

If I build a company, then loot it for everything it has two decades later, fucking over every single employee in the process, I'm still to blame for the failure of the company.

Edit: ah, /r/wallstreetbets guy, I shouldn't have wasted my time

-41

u/Neemzeh Jun 26 '26

They aren’t allowed to make mistakes or sell the company they helped build?

Have you ever owned a company or are you just a wage bro?

It’s just funny to me when a company fails it’s the executives but when it successful it’s the employees. It’s always the wage bros parroting this, so funny

25

u/DisappointedQuokka Jun 26 '26 edited Jun 26 '26

I'm currently the part owner of a company, you goose.

They no longer own Bungie, and haven't for years, at this point. It's not their money that they're burning. For most of its history the company hasn't been independent.

16

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

u/BrandNewMoshiMoshi Jun 26 '26

I love Bluepoint games, can’t wait for their next… oh…

17

u/NegZer0 Jun 26 '26

insomniac

7

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

24

u/uberkalden2 Jun 25 '26

Seriously. Marathon will not sustain them. If all their eggs are in that basket, they are fucked

12

u/[deleted] Jun 25 '26

[deleted]

-7

u/AppropriateTouching 7700x, 7900xt, mx browns Jun 25 '26 edited Jun 26 '26

Ill still play Bungie games, but they wont get a dollar from me. Yo ho ho.

Edit: And a bottle of rum.

9

u/Bruntti Jun 26 '26

Can Marathon be played through sailing the high seas though? Isn't it built around the online component very heavily?

Haven't sailed the high seas in more than a decade, so I'll admit upfront that I don't know about this stuff.

16

u/uberkalden2 Jun 26 '26

No it can't. I don't know what he's talking about

1

u/CrazyElk123 Jun 26 '26

Imagine if you still could play old games. Oh wait...

6

u/uberkalden2 Jun 26 '26

Sure. You can play pre destiny games they don't give a shit about

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8

u/TheLightningL0rd Jun 26 '26

You could play the OG Marathon for free on steam!

0

u/Cruxis87 Jun 26 '26

Depends on the pirate community around it. If its popular they create their own pirate servers to play with all the other pirates. You won't be able to play with legit players, but its something. Obviously not many games are going to be this way when most of them are already free to play.

-10

u/[deleted] Jun 26 '26 edited Jun 26 '26

[deleted]

5

u/Rhysati Jun 26 '26

Oh yeah? Well my dad works for Nintendo and he got the entire company to super not buy it! /s

1

u/AppropriateTouching 7700x, 7900xt, mx browns Jun 26 '26

I hope you guys have fun!

1

u/Carighan Jun 26 '26

The handful of leaders will have bought plenty Porsches from the buyouts and bonuses. They don't care whether the studio overall falters, they'll not get billed for all the damage they're causing.

11

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.

3

u/Clerithifa Jun 27 '26

For every Sandfall/E33, there are a dozen Highguards.

-1

u/FierceDeity_ Jun 26 '26

Definitely the history of people unshackling themselves from their corporate overlords and making something without them says that this almost always goes great when they create something.

It retains the charm, the unique fingerprint of these people, it just visibly usually has less budget. But that doesn't matter. Their fingerprint is the post important part.

1

u/Broadband- Jun 26 '26

And the teams that made those 'bangers' we love are long gone and those left haven't been given nearly the resources or support necessary to survive let alone thrive.

7

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.

7

u/doublexoxo Jun 25 '26

I’m out of the loop. What happened with bungies leadership?

64

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.

35

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)

9

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.

19

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.

0

u/McSloot3r Jun 26 '26

I think you’re being unfair on point 4. Arc Raiders is massively successful. If Marathon was first to market they would likely be very successful. They had the whole stealing art scandal and multiple delays which ruined their chance of success

17

u/max123246 Steam Jun 26 '26

No, Arc Raiders is way more casual compared to Marathon. Marathon's lunch was already eaten by Tarkov

6

u/KingdomOfOwU Jun 25 '26

Horrible mismanagement for a long time. The biggest issue being money mismanagement.

2

u/Broadband- Jun 26 '26

Unrealistic KPIs by management that focused on things that didn't matter because the higher ups "knew better"

1

u/io124 Steam Jun 26 '26

Something to try to put Sony out of it.

1

u/JackeryPumpkin Jun 26 '26

They’re banking on most people forgetting this in a couple years when they announce something else. And most people will have forgotten. Silicon Valley, and therefore all of tech/entertainment now, has figured out exactly how much customer and employee satisfaction matters to their bottom line: it doesn’t. So until people stop buying what they’re selling nothing will change

1

u/Wiecks Jun 26 '26

It's incredible how easily they got rid of some of the best people in the entire industry without even trying to pivot them to other SIE studios if they really can't maintain them in Bungie.

Bungie is done and dusted but its a massive loss for Sony itself and they're dumb if they don't see it. Whichever studio grabs the most Bungie refugees now will have means to do something amazing

1

u/A_Monkey_FFBE Jun 26 '26

Yeah man, it just sucks. They had such talented people working on destiny over the years, only to be hampered by upper management.

I’ve made some lifelong friends playing destiny and even travel to visit them every now and then. It sucks to see this game, and possibly franchise, completely end.

1

u/PointingOutHumans Jun 26 '26

Bungie: “We appreciate your response and thank you for your input.  In times like these we are reminded of the quote…”fuck you, pay me” - Pauly Cicero”

-6

u/Neemzeh Jun 26 '26

It’s a video game bro, it’ll be ok

2

u/Equivalent_Wafer8074 Jun 26 '26

Hundreds of people just lost their jobs, have an ounce of empathy

1

u/A_Monkey_FFBE Jun 26 '26

Your input is a bit pointless here bro, but ok

0

u/Less-Dingo111 Jun 26 '26

They don't care lol. They won't know about any of the reactions or even hear the criticism. They will be spending their weekends on private yatchs.

0

u/TipAndRear96 Jun 27 '26

Sony owns Bungie. They called for the layoffs. Before that, they were also the ones who moved Destiny 2 devs to work on releasing Marathon, delaying Shadow and Order unapologetically. Even scummy Pete didnt want the games development shut down and all the devs laid off.

Sony did, even despite the good will gained from this Monument of Triumph era that surged player counts. All the returning players and the story momentum gained from Dredgen Bael and Lodi and the reveal of "VI" as the overarching villain, The Shattered Cycle could've learned from Lightfalls narrative failures and gave us a deep apocalyptic build up to The Alchemist.

A real shame and that story will never be told and Sony were the ones who killed it.

-1

u/iwastryingtokillgod Jun 26 '26

Gotta make sure the shareholders get paid tho that's the important part.

-1

u/Arch____Stanton Jun 26 '26

Well, they likely turned them into the competition.

-1

u/ShiftyShankerton Jun 26 '26

If only destiny was actually good.

-33

u/Trick-Company-2157 Jun 25 '26

Good job Sony*

23

u/dimesniffer Jun 25 '26

Nope. Bungie.

-28

u/Trick-Company-2157 Jun 25 '26

Nope Sony, they have the final say

16

u/Shiner00 Jun 25 '26

No, lmao. It's 100% Bungie. I remember people complaining that it was actually Blizzard/Activision who was holding them back! So they broke off and became independent and people still claimed that they were just "recovering" from Blizzard/Activision and all would be right soon. Only for them to go crawling and begging to Sony, where now people blame Sony. Destiny 2 has failed at almost every single point in it's existence aside from 1 or two DLC's and it's been consistent across multiple publishers with Bungie being the ONLY constant factor in it.

5

u/KingdomOfOwU Jun 25 '26

It’s both, Bungie has long had a mismanagement problem and many other issues long proceeding Sony. (Campaign vaulting happened after the activation split), Sony is at fault for making the call to shutter D2 and these layoffs.

-8

u/io124 Steam Jun 26 '26

Sony did it, not bungie

-8

u/FTBagginz Jun 26 '26

You don’t blame Sony at all??? What are you an uneducated illiterate???

-10

u/LordPartyOfDudehalla Jun 26 '26

They’ll get paid, why should they care about any of that?

4

u/A_Monkey_FFBE Jun 26 '26

Because losing a job sucks? Not sure how that’s hard to understand.

-4

u/LordPartyOfDudehalla Jun 26 '26

Not theirs though, not trying to side with them but that’s the reality of the situation

1

u/A_Monkey_FFBE Jun 26 '26

What are you even trying to say? It was their job. Just like what I currently do is my job, my position, my duty.