Destiny 2 followers are nonetheless reeling from the information that developer Bungie laid off round 220 folks in July, or roughly 17% of its workforce. Talking on an earnings name, Sony president Hiroki Totoki mentioned the Destiny studio’s restructure in higher element, stating that it got here from a need to “optimize general studio construction.”
Per a report of the decision posted to social media, Totoki stated that the back-office features of Bungie will likely be built-in into different Sony studios, and that the studio’s assets will likely be centered on Destiny 2 and the Marathon reboot. His feedback would appear to point that Sony is taking a more-active position within the studio’s course, making it a more-integrated a part of the prevailing constellation of SIE studios.
This is not the primary time that Totoki has expressed a need to see enchancment from Bungie. Again in February, he stated throughout a financial-results name (through VGC) that whereas he was impressed with Bungie’s creativity and information of dwell service, he felt that the corporate wanted to enhance some areas of its enterprise, together with “use of enterprise bills” and “accountability for improvement timelines.”
The timing of the massive Bungie layoffs stunned many within the trade, particularly for the reason that studio had simply shipped The Closing Form, its best-received content material pack for Destiny 2 in a few years. Nonetheless, stories from Stephen Totilo’s Game Fille newsletter and elsewhere declare that the circumstances of The Closing Form’s launch had been largely irrelevant to the choice, attributable to Bungie lacking Sony’s monetary targets since not less than 2023. A number of senior execs at Bungie had been affected by these layoffs, together with Luke Smith and Mark Noseworthy; Bungie talked about in its weblog submit asserting the departures that “most” of its senior employees had been being let go. A Bloomberg report means that the following Destiny sport, codenamed Payback, was additionally canceled some time in the past.