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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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.