Following the news that Bungie laid off 220 people, details have reportedly been revealed about the company’s future, including that it isn’t currently working on Destiny 3, that it will shift its focus from larger expansions to smaller updates for Destiny 2 that may be free, and that a Destiny spin-off was canceled.
Bloomberg spoke to ten current and former Bungie employees who asked not to be identified, and they “described a company that grew too fast and tried to develop too many projects at once, spreading resources too thin rather than prioritizing its chief moneymaker, Destiny 2.”
Instead of Destiny 3, Bungie Placed a Big Bet on Payback
While there may be many who believed Bungie was hard at work on Destiny 3, especially considering Destiny 2 was released in 2017, the studio decided to shift its focus to something completely new called Payback.
Payback, which was described as taking elements from such games as Warframe and Genshin Impact, was set in the Destiny universe but was meant to “shake up the formula in major ways.” Instead of being a first-person shooter, Payback was being developed as a third-person title that would see players using the franchise’s characters to explore a large world and work together to “battle monsters and solve puzzles.”
This was not being billed as a sequel to Destiny 2, but more of a spin-off. Sadly, Payback was canceled just two months ago so Bungie could prioritize its more imminent games. Instead, it moved much of the payback team to work on Marathon, its PvP-focused extraction shooter live-service game which is set to be released in 2025.
With no Payback and no Destiny 3 in the near future, Bungie is planning to continue supporting Destiny 2, albeit in a different way. Despite Destiny 2’s The Final Shape expansion reviewing very well – we gave it a 9/10 – the studio looks to “no longer pursue paid expansions as it did in the past.” According to one of the sources, sales for each expansion have declined year after year.
Instead of this annual release model for big expansions, Bungie looks to “retain and attract players with smaller-scale drops modeled after Into the Light.” For those unfamiliar, Into the Light was released ahead of The Final Shape and added the Onslaught activity, the Hall of Champions social space, Parade Armor 2.0, the return of 12 iconic guns with the BRAVE Arsenal, and much more.
Furthermore, Bungie is aiming to release these updates for free alongside overhauling activities it hopes will keep its hardcord player satisfied. There are also “other vague plans” that include a storyline that “will feature characters and worlds that Destiny has not yet explored.”
So, instead of big new Destiny 2 expansions, Bungie will put resources into these updates, a smoother onboarding process, and more. In one bright spot, some of the sources said they are “optimistic about the vision for Destiny 2 under new director Tyson Green.”
Trouble at the Top
The layoffs have hit the team hard, and most of the people Bloomberg spoke to were critical of Bungie CEO Pete Parsons, saying he “failed to take accountability for his own bad bets” and that he was “overly optimistic in his communication with the staff.”
There is also worry because longtime veterans Luke Smith and Mark Noseworthy left Bungie this week, and that has led to a lot of “lingering questions about the future of decision-making at Bungie.” Now, without some of its leaders, a big hit to audio, narrative, and player support teams, and much more, Bungie staff are now looking at creating world-class experiences with a “smaller staff, tighter schedules, and a company that looks significantly different than it did three days ago.”
In addition to the layoffs, Bungie is hoping to move 155 of its employees to Sony Interactive Entertainment, and a seperate group will be part of a team working on an incubation project code-named Gummybears.
Ever since Sony’s $3.6 billion acquisition of Bungie, things have not gotten better. Bungie took that cash and “hired hundreds of new staff members and pursued myriad incubation projects, including mobile versions of Destiny, remakes of old games and new franchises.” Now, it’s most important former and current employees are suffering after some of these plans never saw the light of day or turned out as those in charge hoped. One of the sources even noted that Parsons told staff in a meeting in later 2023 that Bungie had missed its revenue targets by 45% and was losing money.
For more, check out how another former Bungie employee claimed the studio faced insolvency without Sony’s acquistion and the games industry’s criticism of Bungie mangagement and Parsons in wake of these layoffs.
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Adam Bankhurst is a writer for IGN. You can follow him on X/Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on TikTok.
