It happened again. Bungie laid off over 200 people, is transferring another 100 people over to Sony, and will be moving roughly 75 people to a new spinoff studio to develop a new IP with Sony’s help. This reduces Bungie’s workforce by a reported 17 percent or so – on top of the layoffs from last October that precipitated a delay in both The Final Shape and Marathon.
In the context of the broader industry crisis, the Bungie layoffs bring the total number of laid off people in 2024 to an estimated 11,400. Since the beginning of 2023, that number has reached an estimated 20,900. Whether you look at the situation up close or from a distance, everything feels like it’s not just going to fall apart, it’s actively in the process of doing so. The human cost of this moment is almost unfathomable, whether you want to call it the disaster that it is or simply, coldly refer to it as a “market correction.”
There is a perspective here that I recognize but ultimately cannot empathize with. It is a perspective that views the cultural object of a game less as such and more as an item in a larger investment portfolio. A small piece on a big board full of various stocks and bonds and other financial instruments that obscenely rich people are paid obscenely to move around into appealing configurations – generally, the more money they can make year over year, the better. Anything that underperforms or even – god forbid – costs money is cut out unceremoniously. Destiny 2 itself cannot be discarded so easily due to its overall profitability (and, let’s face it, because Bungie doesn’t have anything else with which to make money right now) but it’s a trivial matter to trim the fat, as it were.
Bungie CEO Pete Parsons and the rest of his executive team are responsible for these layoffs, let’s be clear. They are responsible for leading the company in a direction that was satisfying to them in the short term but unsustainable over a longer period. They brokered the deal with Sony and have either been unable or unwilling to keep the promise they made to their employees after the deal was finalized. But will Parsons lose his job? No. Will CFO Danielle Porter lose her job? No. Will Ondraus Jenkins, Chief Strategy Officer, or Patrick O’Kelley, Chief Operating Officer, lose their jobs? Absolutely not. They won’t be held accountable for their decisions. But the hundreds of artists, programmers, QA, writers, and musicians who actually make the game more than just a financial instrument have already paid the price for their poor judgment and bad leadership.
This is the case everywhere, not just Bungie; Bungie is just maybe the most egregious example of just how little upper management gives a shit about their subordinates, what with Parsons’ big spending on old cars – $2.4 million worth – in the past year and his unnerving penchant to either invite people to his house to see the cars or tell them about the cars awkwardly in the Bungie lobby before firing them. That aside, we’ve seen similar patterns of “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” this year alone from Microsoft, EA and Embracer Group, just to name a few others. We no longer have Tango Gameworks, a studio that developed Microsoft’s most successful first-party title last year, because of this pattern of behavior.
Unionization is only part of the answer here. Unionization should be pursued, because studios that have unions have better protections and at the very least can negotiate better severance deals if a company decides to lay a bunch of people off. But unionization isn’t going to fix problems inherent to capitalism by itself. It may literally be too much to ask for companies to have executives that care in any way about the cultural product their employees pour their blood, sweat and tears into, but as long as they just care about their balance sheets, we’re never getting out of this mess.
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