Bungie’s layoffs reportedly amounted to around 100 staff

Bungie’s recent layoffs amounted to around 100 staff, or roughly 8% of the developer’s workforce, according to a new report.

It was confirmed on Monday that Bungie was the latest Sony Interactive Entertainment studio to be hit with layoffs, though the scope of the job cuts wasn’t yet clear.

A new report by Bloomberg sheds more light on the situation, saying staff were warned in a meeting earlier this month that revenue was running at around 45% below what was being projected, which chief executive officer Pete Parsons reportedly attributed to poor player retention for Destiny 2.

It’s claimed that staff were told the game’s next expansion, The Final Shape, was being delayed from February 2024 to June, to give staff more time to improve it.

Parsons is also said to have told staff that salary and hiring freezes would be taking place, but two weeks later – on Monday – around 100 staff were then told they were being laid off.

Forbes writer Paul Tassi tweeted more information that he had received from a source, including claims that many employee benefits lasted until the end of the month, meaning that because staff were laid off on October 30 their benefits only lasted a single day.

This was corroborated by Bloomberg’s report, which also noted that healthcare was a separate benefit and will still be available for the next three months to those let go.

One potentially contentious issue is that of employee shares, the majority of which were owned by Bungie’s employees before Sony‘s acquisition.

Last year Sony revealed that around $1.2 billion of its $3.6 billion acquisition of Bungie was to be be spent on employee retention, and would be used to reward existing employees if they didn’t leave and stayed with Bungie for a certain number of years.

Since one of the main reasons for Sony’s acquisition was to make use of Bungie’s knowledge base, it planned “to incentivise the shareholders and other creative talent to continue working at Bungie after the acquisition closes”.

Eligible employees had ‘unvested shares’, which are shares that are put aside for them and can’t be accessed until they meet a certain requirement – in this case, staying with Bungie for a certain number of years.

However, according to Tassi’s source: “Those shares revert to Bungie if you leave, even if you’re fired, which is what’s happening now to many of those affected.”

Further reading

2

Bungie has reportedly delayed Destiny 2’s next expansion and Marathon

News of the delays coincides with job cuts at the studio

Earlier this month, it was reported that The Last of Us studio Naughty Dog was cutting contracts short for dozens of workers, while several developers announced that they had been laid off from PlayStation’s Visual Arts group.

Last week, Sony also confirmed plans to cut jobs at Dreams and LittleBigPlanet developer Media Molecule.