Another bad day for games, as a large part of one of the industry’s most popular studios has been hit with layoffs.
Bungie certainly hasn’t felt like the Bungie many of us have grown to love for a long time now, but that doesn’t make the news any easier to grasp. These are still real people losing their jobs, and it marks another ugly chapter for a studio that once seemed untouchable. More worryingly, it feels like a precursor to what’s to come on the Xbox.
A Notice of Workforce Adjustment and Retraining from the Washington State Department of Employment Security indicates the loss of 292 Bungie jobs in Bellevue, Washington. Effective date of separation is July 9th.
That number doesn’t represent the full scale of the cuts, either. Sony also said there are layoffs across the SIE teams that support Bungie’s operations, meaning the overall impact could be broader than just the Bellevue WARN filing. Previous reports suggested that up to half of the studio was facing layoffs, and Paul Tassi said earlier today that around 400 Bungie employees were on the cusp of layoffs.
Jason Schreier says the layoffs include “most of the Destiny team”, some people working on Marathon and even Sony employees who helped Bungie.
In an internal email published by Sony Interactive Entertainment, Hermen Hulst, CEO of Sony’s Studio Business Group, said the layoffs affect “a large number” of Bungie employees, including “most of the Destiny team” and “some members of the Marathon team.”
Hulst said the decision follows months of discussions with Bungie leadership, with Sony reviewing Bungie’s long-term direction, development priorities, resource needs and place within the broader PlayStation portfolio.
“We explored a number of alternatives before concluding that reductions were necessary,” Hulst wrote, saying the reductions were necessary to align Bungie’s resources with its current priorities and long-term goals.
Bungie’s explanation is even more blunt. In a statement, the studio said that Destiny 2 “has fallen short of expectations over the past few years,” and that with future projects still being lined up, it “couldn’t continue to operate at our previous size.”
That is consistent with where Bungie is now. Destiny 2 recently received its final live service content update, while the studio’s focus is on Marathon. Marathon is far from dead – Sony says in particular that it remains an important part of the portfolio – but it clearly hasn’t magically solved Bungie’s problems. And based on what we’ve learned over the past few weeks, Bungie doesn’t have any other projects in development, either.
On top of the layoffs, Bungie Studio Head Justin Truman is reportedly stepping down, according to Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier. That feature has not been officially confirmed by Sony or Bungie at the time of writing, so treat it with caution for now. That said, Schreier’s sources tend to be very reliable.
Truman only took over last year after longtime Bungie boss Pete Parsons stepped aside, making this another leadership change in what has been a brutal few years for the studio. We do not know why it is reported that Truman is leaving. It could be another changing of the guard, or it could be part of Sony’s broader reshaping of Bungie after years of underperformance. Either way, it paints a very bleak picture.
This is also not Bungie’s first round of cuts under Sony. GeekWire notes that Bungie has now cut more than 600 jobs in three rounds of layoffs since Sony acquired the studio for $3.6 billion in 2022. That includes about 100 jobs by October 2023, another 220 by July 2024, and now 292 Bellevue jobs included in the latest WARN list.
Sony has also taken damage losses against Bungie on more than one occasion, something I’ve covered separately, and today’s news makes that already messy acquisition look even worse.
Meanwhile, Bungie continues. Marathon is still in development, Destiny 2 is still in play, and Sony says it will support affected employees where possible. But there’s no sugarcoating this: this is a huge blow to Bungie, to the people who created Destiny, and to one of the most important studios in the history of sports.
