So many people framed Activision as the bad guy, when we are seeing that they actually staved off some idiotic decisions on Bungie’s part. I have a feeling that while the layoffs are awful, I look at other studios run by Sony and can’t help but wonder if the real issue was just at the local management level, and Sony’s intervention is maybe needed to save Bungie from itself. Pete Parsons is a piece of shit fuckhead.
was with this threat looming that Bungie leadership - not Sony, according to Parsons - made the choice to lay off roughly 100 employees last month.
But the cost-cutting at Bungie isn’t limited to just personnel. Multiple current employees confirmed to IGN that the company has implemented numerous other cost-cutting measures recently, including a studio-wide hiring freeze, reduced travel budgets, elimination of holiday bonuses, keeping its annual Bungie Day virtual, delaying its weeklong company “Pentathalon” event to next December, and reducing numerous morale events such as cooking and knitting classes from monthly to quarterly. Bungie is also pausing or fully ending benefits like annual employee compensation adjustments to meet market rates, its new hire lunch program, employee donation matching, its peer recognition program, and gift cards for employees birthdays.
Imagine buying your freedom from Microsoft only to get acquired by Sony a decade later. I think hindsight being 20/20 they may have just been better off continuing on with Microsoft.
Edit: I’d like to revise my previous position. This is why all devs and studio employees should follow the trend and UNIONIZE IMMEDIATELY.
Under Phil I think they’d be allowed a level of creative freedom but I can’t blame them for wanting to leave under Mattrick; he would have kept them on the Halo hamster wheel forever.
Yeah, I totally understand that. I suppose I am biased because I only played the first Destiny game, and to be honest it just always struck me as the Disney Star Wars version of Halo. It just lacked the compelling story elements and refinement of the early Halo games to me, so even back then I wondered if it was worth it for Bungie to separate from Microsoft.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out that’s for sure. This smells to me like an attempt to lock Destiny in as a Sony exclusive perhaps. So, the irony is that exactly what Bungie was trying to avoid in large part by splitting from Microsoft may end up happening anyway…
Their fate is even sadder in my view, they’re now the live service aid studio. Hopefully Jim Ryan’s replacement can fix that because churning out live service games sounds like a horrible idea
Unfortunately this is just the norm when a company buys another. I give props to the employees thinking it is still Bungie, but it’s not. The second that deal was finalized they became sony employees, and even if on paper they were still Bungie they were always going to become Sony employees.
But business swallows little business. And big business doesn’t care about the jobs it leaves behind, or the people. Bungie as we knew it is dead
This isn’t a case of Sony just “swallowing” a little business. As the article states Bungie board of directors is 2 people from Sony and 3 people from Bungie, which means that while Sony technically owns Bungie the Bungie leadership still makes decisions about how to run the company. Supposedly there’s an obligation on Bungie’s part to meet certain financial goals. If Bungie meets those goals Sony can’t take over the company.
The problem is that Bungie isn’t doing well financially. The Sony takeover is an outcome of Bungie not being able to stay financially independent. That means if Bungie wasn’t under Sony then under the same conditions Bungie would most likely go bankrupt instead.
Bungie as we know it being dead has nothing to do with Sony. Bungie management has essentially killed Bungie.
Yes on paper that’s how it’s all laid out. However anyone who has been through a buyout knows that no parent company intends for the child company to act separately indefinitely. The shotgun clause in there saying they have to do well financially proves it to me. What company hasn’t gone through hard times before? Sony may be playing the long game but they’ll get control eventually, they always knew they would. It was inevitable that this would happen. Guarantee it was written this way probably with projections on when it would likely happen.
Which is why I say as soon as a buyout occurs the old company is gone. The cool culture you had, the lenient bosses, the small company style benefits? Gone. It may take a bit, but they’re going away. Papa business is here and he only cares about the profit margin, not the people, not even the product. They may say it’ll stay the same, but drip by drip the company will change, and a few years later you’ll realize you aren’t working for that cool smaller company anymore, you’re working for the big corpos conglomerate.
I get being pessimistic especially since we don’t know the details of Sony Bungie deal. But I think you’re not aware how bad it’s going at Bungie. Bungie has a huge burn rate according to Microsoft (they also tried to require Bungie and that was brought up as the biggest risk). Bungie missed their own revenue projections by 45%. When the layoffs happened some of the employees were told that the studio would be in great jeopardy if they were still independent.
Everything we know is pointing at Bungie possibly going bankrupt, if they were still independent. Sony swooping in is just Sony trying to save their 3,6 billion investment.
And I’m not sure why you’re trying to paint a small tight-knit company of Bungie? They have 1000+ employees even after the layoffs. The biggest criticism at Glassdoor is the horrible management. Bungie has been slipping into corporatism well before Sony.
Wasn’t planning on playing it but now I’m definitely not going to. Minimum system requirements will probably be absurd anyway. 69420gb of ram and a rtx 9990ti.
Walpeach and waldaisy would’ve been real cool actually. And then we could have a upside down world type style Mario/wario game where walpeach saves wario
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