Another disgusting trend seen amongst big studios, the layoff of employees when the going gets even a little bit tough. Bungie recently posted a blog by CEO Pete Parsons,stating that Bungie is laying off over 200 employees due to rising development costs and economic conditions. These layoffs are occurring even after the runaway success of their final DLC for Destiny 2 called “The Final Shape”.
What “development costs”?
To give a short recap, In October of last year, Bungie had approximately 1400 people employed under it and now they have reduced their employment force to around 850 people, shy of almost half of its original amount. Now Bungie have to soon ship their next title, Marathon, an extraction shooter closest to Call of Duty’s ‘DMZ” mode. With only a trailer and some early gameplay nothing else has been shared about this title, leaving many unsure and doubting its capability in reaching the heights Destiny did.
Now to understand the title of this paragraph, this is effectively due to negligent management. This is the short, real answer no matter how much corporate slang gets used by Bungie to sugarcoat their mistakes. This comes from the blog post stating that “it has always been their goal in the last 5 years to ship games in three enduring, global franchises…”, then going on to state that this model had “stretched their talent too thin” and also “..raised development costs..”, per the blog post they had thought that the revenue received from Destiny 2 along with some outside investments would be enough to fund Destiny 2, Marathon and another unnamed new title.
The leadership of Bungie after selling the Sony for 3.8 billion dollars did state that there would be no job cuts at the end of the acquisition and yet here we are with almost half the workforce laid off or gone to work under an unfamiliar company. Now everytime there is a massive layoff occurs everyone should be reminded of the leadership that knows the right thing to do. Take a pay cut, this of course is referring to the CEO of Nintendo who famously apologized and took a pay cut to prevent layoffs from the company when they hit a rough patch, so the question to be asked is “What development costs?”.
No Apologies and No Regrets, absolutely Nothing.
Nowhere in the blog post is an apology, resignation or anything remotely hinting at any regret at his lack in leadership. Instead of trying to keep jobs Pete Parsons would rather spend a staggering 2.3 million dollars at auctions on classic cars to expand his car collection after Sony’s Acquisition. Now he isn’t the only leader to have done this, he just had unfortunate luck in one of these auction houses where his profile had become public. There are even videos of Parsons laughing and enjoying showing off this expensive car collection while making financially crippling decisions leading to loss of livelihoods for regular folks.
People Rightfully, Aren’t Buying Any Of It.
To state it again, no amount of corporate literature sugarcoating your mismanagement is enough to soften the backlash. The current and former community managers have stated publicly on X(formally Twitter) their distaste, stating that the fallout of this wrongly falling on the workers again when it should be on the leadership. The former community manager gave a more clear direct response demanding Pete Parsons to step down, calling him a liar and a thief and reiterating that the one who should be out of a job is him not anyone else. A lot more journalists and industry talent at various positions have spoken out relaying their frustration at the blatant lie of “development costs” being a reason.
Now there is somewhat a brightside as a lot of companies now are unionizing with Bethesda being one of the first companies under Microsoft to get unionized along with Activision who also unionized and finally the biggest one being Blizzard with over 500 employees unionized. Hopefully, more and more of the games industry will unionize, preventing incompetent leaders from profiting whilst driving their respective companies to ground and making their employees pay for it.
