Bungie getting ahead of the journalists on this one, for once.

You know, I've been listening to Johnathan Blow a lot lately.

For some time now, he has been predicting that tons of software jobs were going to vanish. His argument was that people just aren't that efficient, and every company has been over hiring. Look at Twitter. It went from 8000 people to 1500 people under Musk. Everyone said the site was going to explode, and it would be a disaster. And yet, it appears to be functioning fine technically. The site still works. Everything is going on as normal. Any difficulties would seem to stem from Musk's decisions about what to prioritize and what not to, rather than a lack of manpower.

Blow argued that people would pick up on this all throughout the software industry, including the games industry, and start cutting jobs when they realize it not only won't hurt productivity, but save money on burn. That pretty much any medium or large sized company could downsize and be either at the same level, or even better off given that larger teams are less productive on a per person basis due to coordination overhead and compartmentalization.

So is this a natural correction, or a sign of Bungie cutting costs to stay afloat? It's probably some of both.

Either way, I think we are seeing the decline after Bungie's peak. Just hoping they can have some level of sustainable success going forward.

It’s sad to see Bungie becoming a Destiny / Marathon-exclusive developer (assuming Marathon doesn’t sputter and die in its first year). The 155 SIE roles sound like they could just be whisked away by Sony to other projects on a whim though, and that’s a bummer.

Them also tossing a team aside into a new studio is better than outright canceling the project, I guess, but yeah.

Destin3 confirmed… :/

It is abundantly clear what needs to happen at Bungie in order to address these managerial issues once and for all.

For over five years, it has been our goal to ship games in three enduring, global franchises. To realize that ambition, we set up several incubation projects, each seeded with senior development leaders from our existing teams. We eventually realized that this model stretched our talent too thin, too quickly.  It also forced our studio support structures to scale to a larger level than we could realistically support, given our two primary products in development – Destiny and Marathon. 

Additionally, in 2023, our rapid expansion ran headlong into a broad economic slowdown, a sharp downturn in the games industry, our quality miss with Destiny 2: Lightfall, and the need to give both The Final Shape and Marathon the time needed to ensure both projects deliver at the quality our players expect and deserve. We were overly ambitious, our financial safety margins were subsequently exceeded, and we began running in the red.

"We were overly ambitious"... yeah, I'll say.

At the very least, we finally have an admission of fault and a show of leadership from the man who should have been front-and-center this entire time. So I'll give him kudos for stepping up to the plate at long last, although it's not nearly enough, but I cannot imagine how Bungie managed to put itself in this position at all. This is the inevitable consequence of long-term poor management, plain and simple, and the lowest employees on the totem pole are paying the price as always.

EDIT: Take this with a grain of salt, naturally, but it's possible that the inevitable has already come to pass.

All I see is that Pete Parsons should be let go or step down. Over-ambitiousness is a cute way of saying mismanagement and failure at a leadership level.

My first thought after reading all this?

"I hope Veegie is ok."

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

So…

Is their new studio in the Netherlands just not happening? What's going on there?

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-08-02/sony-s-bungie-maker-of-halo-and-destiny-faces-reckoning-after-m...

Flush with cash, Bungie hired hundreds of new staff members and pursued myriad incubation projects, including mobile versions of Destiny, remakes of old games and new franchises.

We can narrow this down! Bungie doesn't own Myth, Oni, or Halo. So… that leaves Marathon, PiD, and Minotaur. I can't imagine Desert Storm or GNOP getting a remake.

My money would have been on Marathon, as a tie in for their new extraction shooter of the same name.