Mere moments after laying off eight percent of his staff, Bungie CEO Pete Parsons tweeted thoughts and prayers to the 100 people who, through no fault of their own, had just lost their jobs. Rather than take responsibility or share remorse that his poor leadership led to this horrible outcome for so many, Parsons' tweet is entirely detached, simply acknowledging that their work has made an impact on the studio, as though all of these artists, producers, QA, HR, legal, social media, publishing, marketing, and player support employees just up and quit of their own accord. It was a tasteless, cruel message to share while simultaneously locking people out of all their accounts so they couldn't even say goodbye. Bungie's comms team would have advised him not to post it, but he fired most of them too.
It's not surprising that a CEO would make such a dispassionate statement about upending the lives of his own employees. Executives throughout the game industry would have us believe mass layoffs are unavoidable, something that we just have to accept is part of doing business. According to a Bloomberg report, staff were told the layoffs were a consequence of the company missing this year's revenue targets by 45 percent. Destiny 2's player retention is down, and whether that's a result of Lightfall's poor reception, an audience that's losing interest in a six year old game, or an unprecedentedly overcrowded release schedule that left little room for live service hobby games, ultimately we didn't buy as much Silver as Bungie thought we should've, and now 100 people have to try to find a new job during the holidays.
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If your memory is remarkably short, you might be inclined to see this as a simple and straightforward situation in which a new release underperformed, and now layoffs are naturally following. If I was one of the people losing my job, sitting in an unexpected team meeting in Bungie's recently renovated 208,000 square foot office in Bellevue, or its brand new international studio in Amsterdam, , I'd probably have a very different perspective about the company's recent revenue problems.
I don't purport to be a financial analyst, and I don't know one thing about running a game studio, but I am good at recognizing patterns. For instance, I've noticed that revenue projections always seem to be higher than the year before, regardless of any influencing factors that might have an impact on your business like, say, a pandemic that has everyone locked inside playing lots of video games.
I don't know if there's a sophisticated algorithm that determines how much Bungie should make every year or if these numbers are just pulled out of someone's ass, but it wasn't exactly a surprise that 2023 was a crowded year for games, and while the overall size of the pie continues to grow, the number of games being released each month meant there would necessarily be smaller slices to go around this year, especially for a studio that only has one game out right now. Bungie's projections apparently didn't account for factors that seem totally obvious.
Maybe it's the case that, with a Sony acquisition on the line, projecting a worse year than the year before just isn't an option, even when you know that's what's going to happen. It might be easier to just make up some numbers, and when you fall short, make your employees suffer the consequences. After all, that's how every giant studio operates, and they all seem to get away with it. It probably helps that, when planning for an inevitable round of layoffs, you already know that . I suspect someone was crunching those numbers to figure out exactly how much money Bungie could take from its own employees before kicking them out the door.
I don't know, maybe layoffs are just a part of doing business. Maybe you do have to lay people off in November, knowing full well no one out there will be hiring until at least the start of Q1 next year. And maybe to have to do it on the second to last day of the month, ensuring people lose practically all of their benefits immediately so you don't have to keep them covered. Maybe you have to lie to the public and your employees that there won't be any layoffs following last year's Sony acquisition, then try to hide the scope of the layoffs, while telling the remaining employees that the company had kept "" to continue working on Destiny 2. Apparently beloved , or , who worked on the art team for more than 20 years, were the wrong people
Maybe that's all just the way business works, but it seems pretty callous to me.
