Bungie lays off 220 employees; CEO says studio was ‘overly ambitious’ in memo detailing miscues

Bellevue, Wash.-based sport developer Bungie introduced Wednesday that it’s shedding roughly 17% of its workforce, or 220 roles.

“As a result of rising prices of improvement and trade shifts in addition to enduring financial circumstances, it has develop into clear that we have to make substantial modifications to our value construction and focus improvement efforts completely on Future and Marathon,” CEO Pete Parsons wrote in a submit on the official Bungie website.

The layoffs have an effect on “each stage” of the corporate, and embrace “most of our government and senior chief roles,” as per Parsons’ submit.

As well as, Bungie will combine roughly 155 (12%) of its present roles into its dad or mum firm Sony Interactive Leisure, and can stop inside improvement on one in every of its subsequent unannounced tasks.

That mission, an motion sport set in “a brand-new science-fantasy universe,” could be the new IP that Bungie was teasing as recently as August of last year. Notably, it hasn’t been canceled, however will as an alternative be spun out to a brand new developer within the PlayStation Studios community.

Parsons writes that the reorganization is the results of a mixture of things, such because the “high quality miss” of final 12 months’s unpopular Future 2 growth Lightfall, the interior effort of sustaining improvement on each D2 and the upcoming PVP shooter Marathon, and the overall financial slowdown of 2023.

“We have been overly bold, our monetary security margins have been subsequently exceeded, and we started working within the crimson,” Parsons wrote.

Whereas Future 2’s most up-to-date growth, June’s The Ultimate Form, was met with rave reviews, it didn’t herald sufficient income to forestall the present reorganization. Bungie will now work completely on Future and the upcoming revival of Marathon.

Based in 1991, Bungie is at present greatest identified for its massively-multiplayer on-line shooter Future 2, which wrapped up its present predominant story arc in June. Bungie was additionally the unique developer on the Halo sequence, which launched alongside the Xbox console in 2001 and quickly turned a tentpole franchise for Microsoft’s console division. Bungie was bought by Microsoft in 2000, went impartial once more in 2007, and was subsequently purchased by SIE in 2022.

That is Bungie’s second main reorganization in 9 months, following the dismissal of 100 staff in October. On the time of the earlier layoffs, Bungie employed greater than 1,400 individuals; as of Parsons’ Wednesday-morning announcement, it’s right down to round 850.

Layoffs and shutdowns have been an endemic downside within the online game trade for the final 18 months, with nicely over 10,000 staff dismissed from firms around the globe since January.

Analysts have blamed the general instability on elements that embrace a dramatic slowdown in accessible VC funding; a delayed market correction following the pandemic-era gaming increase of 2020-2021; a constantly flooded launch schedule, which has resulted in additional accessible video video games than there are individuals fascinated with taking part in them; and the long-term impacts of the trade’s growing concentrate on “video games as a service.”