Following the news of significant layoffs at Bungie earlier this week, there’s been a lot of further reporting on what this means for the company’s future and how they’ve ended up in this place. Senior staff have left, a new Destiny game has reportedly been cancelled, and many have called for CEO Pete Parsons to quit for mismanaging the company over the last few years.
The layoffs were announced on Wednesday by Bungie CEO Pete Parsons, with 220 of the company’s 1300 headcount losing their jobs, while a further 155 would be able to move across to the wider PlayStation business, and around 40 to form a new studio and take on an incubation project. That’s roughly a third of the company’s workforce, and follows on from 100 employees losing their jobs last October, leaving the new headcount at around 850 employees.
As part of this, it’s reported that key Bungie figures from Destiny 2’s early revival have departed the company. Luke Smith and Mark Noseworthy have apparently left (per Jeff Grubb’s Game Mess Decides podcast) following the cancellation of their Destiny spin-off game, codenamed Payback. This had been reported as being Destiny 3, but as is often the case, further details are leaked once people are no longer employed, and Jason Schreier’s sources state it was not a direct sequel, and actually cancelled some time ago.
The layoffs have been met with a lot of shock from outside viewers, given the very positive reception of Destiny 2: The Final Shape. Bungie had delayed the expansion’s release in an effort to come back from failing to meet financial expectations with the previous year’s Lightfall, and by all accounts, The Final Shape was the narrative finale that Destiny needed and deserved.
However, Stephen Totilo reports that the deep job cuts were planned to happen regardless of the reception or success of The Final Shape. The need for job cuts was only made worse by The Final Shape having “sold less than Lightfall”, despite its positive reception. As Parsons stated in the job cuts announcement, “We were overly ambitious, our financial safety margins were subsequently exceeded, and we began running in the red.”
Since that announcement, a lot of anger has been directed at Parsons personally for his decision making, leadership and level of accountability. Parsons claimed that the leadership team “did everything we could to avoid today’s outcome,” but there have been various former employees calling for Parsons to quit, especially with anecdotes about him inviting them to view his personal car collection – a collection that has been found on car bidding site Bring A Trailer, and which shows a total value of $2.4 million, over $450,000 of which came since October 2023, the time of the first wave of layoffs.
There’s also analysis of how this ties back into Sony’s 2022 acquisition of Bungie for $3.6 billion. Speaking to Totilo, an anonymous former Bungie insider said, “I think Sony overpaid for Bungie. I think Bungie sold things they were just not able to deliver.” The company had seemingly overstated their earning potential, while courting Sony as a buyer.
And Parsons is again going to be in the spotlight for that, as part of the 2022 acquisition was that Bungie would remain autonomous. That autonomy reportedly came into threat last year as Bungie started to miss financial targets, which was seemingly a driving factor behind layoffs late last year, so the company leadership could try to retain control.
Bungie is remaining committed to supporting Destiny 2 going forward and the development of extraction shooter Marathon, but the company’s future still feels uncertain. Jeff Grubb is claiming that, in time, Sony will take over control of Bungie’s management, similar to all other developers owned by Sony Interactive Entertainment.
Bungie has announced it is laying off 220 staff, approximately 17% of its workforce, across all levels of the company including leadership roles. Pete Parsons, CEO of Bungie, has released a long statement for the reasons why 220 will be losing their jobs at the development studio. This includes the economic downturn of recent years, and costs relating to Destiny 2 and Marathon exceeding the financial limits of the company.
Pete Parsons has also confirmed that Bungie will become more integrated into Sony Interactive Entertainment, with 12% of roles being moved over to Sony. In addition, Bungie is spinning off a yet unnamed project into PlayStation Studios with the establishment of a new studio to continue work on the project. The full statement can be read below.
This morning, I’m sharing with all of you some of the most difficult changes we’ve ever had to make as a studio. Due to rising costs of development and industry shifts as well as enduring economic conditions, it has become clear that we need to make substantial changes to our cost structure and focus development efforts entirely on Destiny and Marathon.
That means beginning today, 220 of our roles will be eliminated, representing roughly 17% of our studio’s workforce.
These actions will affect every level of the company, including most of our executive and senior leader roles.
Today is a difficult and painful day, especially for our departing colleagues, all of which have made important and valuable contributions to Bungie. Our goal is to support them with the utmost care and respect. For everyone affected by this job reduction, we will be offering a generous exit package, including severance, bonus and health coverage.
I realize all of this is hard news, especially following the success we have seen with The Final Shape. But as we’ve navigated the broader economic realities over the last year, and after exhausting all other mitigation options, this has become a necessary decision to refocus our studio and our business with more realistic goals and viable financials.
We are committing to two other major changes today that we believe will support our focus, leverage Sony’s strengths, and create new opportunities for Bungie talent.
First, we are deepening our integration with Sony Interactive Entertainment, working to integrate 155 of our roles, roughly 12%, into SIE over the next few quarters. SIE has worked tirelessly with us to identify roles for as many of our people as possible, enabling us together to save a great deal of talent that would otherwise have been affected by the reduction in force.
Second, we are working with PlayStation Studios leadership to spin out one of our incubation projects – an action game set in a brand-new science-fantasy universe – to form a new studio within PlayStation Studios to continue its promising development.
This will be a time of tremendous change for our studio.
Let’s unpack how we ended up in this position; it’s important to understand how we got here.
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.
After this new trajectory became clear, we knew we had to change our course and speed, and we did everything we could to avoid today’s outcome. Even with exhaustive efforts undertaken across our leadership and product teams to resolve our financial challenges, these steps were simply not enough.
As a result, today we must say goodbye to incredible talent, colleagues, and friends.
This will be a challenging time at Bungie, and we’ll need to help our team navigate these changes in the weeks and months ahead. This will be a hard week, and we know that our team will need time to process, to ask questions, and to absorb this news. Today, and over the next several weeks, we will host team meetings and town halls, team breakout sessions, and private, individual sessions to ensure we are keeping our communication open and transparent.
Bungie will continue to make great games. We still have over 850 team members building Destiny and Marathon, and we will continue to build amazing experiences that exceed our players’ expectations.
There will be a time to talk about our goals and projects, but today is not that day. Today, our focus is on supporting our people.
I always tell people that I’ve been with Destiny since the first alpha test. For some reason, it’s always been a point of pride for me. My own way of saying, “Hey, I’ve been behind this vision since the beginning. I’ve been there through the highs and the lows, and I’m still here.” But following a second round of…
Destiny and Marathon developers Bungie are laying off 220 people - around 17% of their total workforce - as studio heads try to offset a financial crisis brought on by "overly ambitious" expansion, individual project "misfires", and a wider economic downturn in 2023. Bungie are also transferring a further 155 roles to parent company Sony Interactive Entertainment, and are spinning out an untitled incubation project - an "action game set in a brand-new science-fantasy universe" - to form a new PlayStation studio.
Destiny and Marathon developers Bungie are laying off 220 people - around 17% of their total workforce - as studio heads try to offset a financial crisis brought on by "overly ambitious" expansion, individual project "misfires", and a wider economic downturn in 2023. Bungie are also transferring a further 155 roles to parent company Sony Interactive Entertainment, and are spinning out an untitled incubation project - an "action game set in a brand-new science-fantasy universe" - to form a new PlayStation studio.
Bungie also recently canceled an unannounced Destiny spin-off game called Payback.
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 …
Marathon, the 1994 video game that marked Halo and Destiny developer Bungie's first foray into the world of first-person sci-fi shooters, is - as Bungie previously said it would be - now available on Steam for free. And the remaining two titles in the series are due at a later date.
Marathon Classic, as the Steam release is known, has been developed by the team behind Aleph One - a fan-created engine based on the Marathon 2 source code - and promises "authentic gameplay using the original [Marathon] data files". However, it also features optional widescreen HUD support, 3D filtering/perspective, positional audio, and 60+ fps interpolation, "just in case," as the team puts it, "the original is too authentic."
"Alien forces have boarded the colony ship UESC Marathon in the Tau Ceti system, in orbit around humanity’s first interstellar colony," reads the scene-setting blurb for Marathon Classic. "The situation is dire, and as a security officer assigned to the Marathon, your duty is to defend the ship and its crew from the alien threat."
Marathon, the 1994 video game that marked Halo and Destiny developer Bungie's first foray into the world of first-person sci-fi shooters, is - as Bungie previously said it would be - now available on Steam for free. And the remaining two titles in the series are due at a later date.
Marathon Classic, as the Steam release is known, has been developed by the team behind Aleph One - a fan-created engine based on the Marathon 2 source code - and promises "authentic gameplay using the original [Marathon] data files". However, it also features optional widescreen HUD support, 3D filtering/perspective, positional audio, and 60+ fps interpolation, "just in case," as the team puts it, "the original is too authentic."
"Alien forces have boarded the colony ship UESC Marathon in the Tau Ceti system, in orbit around humanity’s first interstellar colony," reads the scene-setting blurb for Marathon Classic. "The situation is dire, and as a security officer assigned to the Marathon, your duty is to defend the ship and its crew from the alien threat."
Marathon, the 1994 video game that marked Halo and Destiny developer Bungie's first foray into the world of first-person sci-fi shooters, is - as Bungie previously said it would be - now available on Steam for free. And the remaining two titles in the series are due at a later date.
Marathon Classic, as the Steam release is known, has been developed by the team behind Aleph One - a fan-created engine based on the Marathon 2 source code - and promises "authentic gameplay using the original [Marathon] data files". However, it also features optional widescreen HUD support, 3D filtering/perspective, positional audio, and 60+ fps interpolation, "just in case," as the team puts it, "the original is too authentic."
"Alien forces have boarded the colony ship UESC Marathon in the Tau Ceti system, in orbit around humanity’s first interstellar colony," reads the scene-setting blurb for Marathon Classic. "The situation is dire, and as a security officer assigned to the Marathon, your duty is to defend the ship and its crew from the alien threat."
Halo and Destiny developers Bungie have released their classic shooter Marathon for free on Steam, with sequels Marathon 2 and Marathon Infinity to follow. The Steam ports are the work of the celebrated Aleph One community developers, who've kept Bungie's old Marathon 2 game engine going as an open source project - and who still have PC ports of all three games available on their own site, if you'd rather not truck with Steam.
There are some names in the FPS genre that have shaken the foundations of the gaming world. Half-Life, Halo, Doom, Quake, and a few more have become legends that still reverberate today. Halo in particular became a colossal cultural phenomenon but long before Master Chief set foot on a space circle, its developer Bungie made a fascinating shooter called Marathon, and it has just launched on Steam for free.
Marathon is now available on Steam! But wait, I don’t mean the Marathon revival that Bungie is currently working on. I mean the original Marathon from 1994. The studio announced the shadow drop on X (formerly Twitter) on May 10 with one extra bit of good news—It’s free!
The official Bungie Twitter account has just revealed that Aleph One, Marathon's open-source engine community, has released Classic Marathon to play on Steam completely free of charge. If you have a little over 65 MB of free storage on your PC, you too can now enjoy one of the best and most elusive classic FPS titles of all time.
Readers should know this is not an official Bungie release, but it does have Bungie's seal of approval. It's also a port of the best version of Marathon currently out there.
What's new in Steam's release of Marathon
Though this is a surprise release, it's already a proven title. The quality-of-life updates brought by Aleph One's Classic Marathonare already known, as it's a port of an already existing fan re-tinkering of Marathon. You can expect to find the following improvements:
Widescreen support
Modernized UI and UX
Lua scripting support
Third-party modding
Online Multiplayer
OpenGL support
Why Marathon on Steam is a big deal
While FPS fans have had DOOM on PC ever since it came out, the Marathon series, one of the genre's best early outings, was only available for Mac owners during most of its lifetime. Even though Marathon was later ported to the Xbox Live Arcade, it remained unplayable on PC in any quasi-official capacity until now. If you enjoy classic FPS games, Halo, and Destiny, giving Marathon a try might prove a great trip back into the roots of this great genre.
An official new take on Marathon as an extraction shooter is also in the works, though Bungie has yet to announce a release date. The remainder of the Marathon trilogy will also make its way to Valve's platform at an undisclosed date.
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Bungie also recently canceled an unannounced Destiny spin-off game called Payback.
