Bungie's deep job cuts were in the works prior to Destiny's most recent release, sources say

The acclaimed studio has been shedding jobs since Sony bought it, but employee ire is focused on Bungie leaders more than the bosses at PlayStation

Destiny 2: The Final Shape. Screenshot: Bungie.

A second round of deep job cuts at Destiny studio Bungie in less than a year sent shockwaves through the games industry on Wednesday.

The cuts were not a sudden move. A sizable new round of layoffs had been planned by Bungie management for months, before the launch of the studio’s acclaimed Destiny 2 expansion The Final Shape this past June, two former Bungie employees told Game File.

The layoffs were announced publicly yesterday by Bungie CEO Pete Parsons, who said 220 workers would lose their jobs, out of a workforce of about 1300. Bungie is also working with parent company Sony “to integrate 155 of our roles" into its PlayStation group, Sony Interactive Entertainment, Parsons said.

Bungie will also “spin out one of our incubation projects—-an action game set in a brand-new science-fantasy universe—to form a new studio within PlayStation Studios to continue its promising development,” he said.  

Sony purchased Bungie in 2022 for $3.6 billion, at least partially due to its development and management of Destiny 2, the sci-fi first-person shooter that launched in 2017 and had entrenched itself as a beloved free-to-play, massively multiplayer, continuously updated live-service adventure.

But Bungie’s leaders had overstated their studio’s financial prospects to Sony, and Wednesday’s cuts were needed to stop continued losses that amounted to an ongoing reality check, three ex-Bungie sources told Game File.

“I think Sony overpaid for Bungie,” one of the former insiders said, on condition of anonymity to avoid damaging their career. “I think Bungie sold things they were just not able to deliver.”