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News Layoffs hit Bungie. Marathon and Destiny 2: The Final Shape both delayed (New Report: Sony could take full control if revenue goals not met)

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HockeyBird

HockeyBird

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Sad news. Bungie was recently bought out by Playstation and are considered the gold standard for the live service model. But even they can't escape layoffs.
 
Stupidity to the max.

Let's take our world class talented studios that made Playstation popular, cut them to shreds, then expect bigger games from them at even less time. While raising prices for consumers at extraordinary levels.
 
Ultimately, to companies like Sony these people are just numbers. They acquired 10 studios in the last three years and now they got a few more numbers to tweak because line must go up. Don't be surprised if they start closing down some as well. The same is happening to Embracer and it will also happen to Microsoft post-ABK acquisition. It's just what they do.

welcome to the family
 
I don’t know how else to say this: Business is just dumb sometimes. These companies collected so much cash over the pandemic, they are pressured to spend it on something so they acquire a bunch of companies. Then now, cash flow is less, so they have to make cuts.

Few companies are like Apple and Nintendo and happy to sit on piles and piles of cash and I would say they are both their own versions of a golden standard on how to run a business.
 
Neves said:
Do you think this gives more credence to the rumour that they are slowing down their GaaS initiative and teaming up with 3rd parties for more single-player exclusives?
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Bungie is not the only Sony/PlayStation owned studio affected by layoffs.
 
Dardan Sandiego said:
Bungie is not the only Sony/PlayStation owned studio affected by layoffs.
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Yeah, but I feel like if you're going all in on GaaS then the one studio you have that's experts in it and are supposedly supervising all the other ones would probably avoid layoffs, and if anything would actually grow.
 
Neves said:
Do you think this gives more credence to the rumour that they are slowing down their GaaS initiative and teaming up with 3rd parties for more single-player exclusives?
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Not necessarily when you consider they spent all the money on Bungie, and their main project is GAAS by nature. Unless it's fully stated that other non-GAAS studio/titles was stopped from pivoting towards the other direction, there has yet to be concrete proof. If anything the situation with Bungie is more of bad project management with all the delays since the acquisition.
 
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Neves said:
Yeah, but I feel like if you're going all in on GaaS then the one studio you have that's experts in it and are supposedly supervising all the other ones would probably avoid layoffs, and if anything would actually grow.
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I don't necessarily think that it would make them immune from layoffs when this seems like a reaction to their gaming division's declining operating income. But we'll have to see which positions were affected.
 
yeah sorry but with the success of playstation, this amount of layoffs is really baffling


serious WHAT is going on?
 
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This all sucks, and I think it’s making me even more upset because I just finished reading Press Reset which is all about how much the game industry screws over its developers. 2023 is getting lauded as one of the best years ever in games, but there have been so many layoffs. What’s going to happen if the next couple years are as barren as they look?
 
Neves said:
Not sure how reliable this guy is, but according to him quite a few positions were affected


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These unfortunately look like pretty traditional layoffs following consolidation where the larger company can take over these duties more efficiently and then gets rid of the employees from the business they purchased.
 
Neves said:
Not sure how reliable this guy is, but according to him quite a few positions were affected


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John Harker over at Era, who knows his shit, is saying that these could be redundancies on the publishing side and/or overstaffing for certain projects. It doesn't seem like this is the result of a sudden shift in strategy.

The "problem" with GaaS is also that it's one of the few solution Sony has to counteract their lower (compared to previous years!) profit margins. The PS+ price hike was only one part of that.
 
The fucked up thing about this is that Bungie is probably one of Sony's most successful studios, to the point that (rumor has it) they were brought in to access TLOU GaaS themselves and impacted the decision to delay it. They are one of the premiere GaaS studios, probably THE metric after stuff like Fortnite or CoD Warzone. Regardless of whether the recent dlc was disappointing, this is too much.
Dardan Sandiego said:
welcome to the family
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welcome-to-the-family-son-resident-evil7.gif


WestEgg said:
2023 is getting lauded as one of the best years ever in games, but there have been so many layoffs. What’s going to happen if the next couple years are as barren as they look?
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Most of the developers who made the best games this years are indie developers or Japanese publishers who have not announced layoffs. I agree with what you're putting down tho. Has insomniac announced layoffs? I know Naughty Dog did.
 
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Frankly, I don't like what Bungie or more accurately Destiny represents in modern AAA gaming. So many horrible trends were popularized by them. The idea of having them review the TLOS multiplayer for stickiness gives me pause.

I wonder exactly what projects they have that may be impacted by these lay offs.

Sony definately has some budget bloat in some of their titles. I'm not surprised we are seeing layoffs, especially with some economic slow down. Debt isn't free anymore. But I'd really prefer that the employees were directed at more, smaller projects rather than laid off. I suppose Sony has better metrics than I do and can easily re-hire whenever they want. Sucks that employees' lives are so disposable.
 
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Neves said:
Not sure how reliable this guy is, but according to him quite a few positions were affected


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A lot of those positions make this look like your typical post-acquisition layoffs where they bring all of that stuff in house and "trim the fat". That is why I will never cheer on acquisitions, regardless of who is doing it.

WestEgg said:
This all sucks, and I think it’s making me even more upset because I just finished reading Press Reset which is all about how much the game industry screws over its developers. 2023 is getting lauded as one of the best years ever in games, but there have been so many layoffs. What’s going to happen if the next couple years are as barren as they look?
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Next couple of years will be very interesting for gaming. Like you said, we are in the middle of a legendary year for gaming (as per Matt's tweet earlier today), but next year for games is looking to be less exciting off the bat. Hardware and accessories will probably be down, especially if Nintendo's next system is coming later in the year. Companies like Sony and Microsoft keep talking about record growth, but what if they have a year with negative growth? I hope it doesn't happen, but they might make bigger cuts, which would suck for everyone.



I'm a little bullish about 2025 for game releases but that is another topic for another thread.
 
I guess Sony will continue to downsize more in-house studios and rely more on third party to pick up the slack with their IP’s

Don’t know if that is such a good idea if Sony just plans to take the cheapest developer and hopes the games sell millions because of the brand name
 
I remember when Sony was recovering from the PS3 disaster, and there was this moment when a lot of people hadn't yet noticed but they had really got their shit together despite the PS3 still being a bit of a meme. Meanwhile Xbox was starting to fuck around with Kinect and so on.

It was obvious that the PS4 would be a huge success if Sony could just keep their momentum going, and that's what happened.

Right now it kind of feels like the opposite. Playstation is thriving, but things don't seem... right. Feels like Wily Coyote running off the ledge, and for a while he keeps on running just fine, but the audience can see that something's wrong, and there's a fall coming.
 
Josh5890 said:
A lot of those positions make this look like your typical post-acquisition layoffs where they bring all of that stuff in house and "trim the fat". That is why I will never cheer on acquisitions, regardless of who is doing it.
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Pretty much. After Sony acquired Bungie, it was only a matter of time before these layoffs were announced.
 
Disgusted, but not surprised. That's another one for my "why I'll never be positive about an acquisition" pile.
 
Heron said:
I remember when Sony was recovering from the PS3 disaster, and there was this moment when a lot of people hadn't yet noticed but they had really got their shit together despite the PS3 still being a bit of a meme. Meanwhile Xbox was starting to fuck around with Kinect and so on.

It was obvious that the PS4 would be a huge success if Sony could just keep their momentum going, and that's what happened.

Right now it kind of feels like the opposite. Playstation is thriving, but things don't seem... right. Feels like Wily Coyote running off the ledge, and for a while he keeps on running just fine, but the audience can see that something's wrong, and there's a fall coming.
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Playstation has not had serious competition for over a decade now.

We will see what happens when Sony loses marketing rights for CoD, and that goes to Xbox. And if the switch 2 can get most third party support day and date.

Once those two happens, it's going to be a tough sell for a PS5. Especially with Sony studios struggling to put out even a single game a year.
 
Mr Swine said:
I guess Sony will continue to downsize more in-house studios and rely more on third party to pick up the slack with their IP’s
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This has been my conclusion this year, especially after that so-called hyped up showcase in the first half of the year. They are lucky I'm a big Marvel fan.

Seeing all of these layoffs due to mismanagement, downsizing, not meeting sales etc feels bad to see. There will definitely be repercussions over the next 2-3 with game release output.
 
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Dekuman said:
Time for Nintendo to build a new studio or expand retro and pick up these laid off workers
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A lot of these layoffs are in publishing and community management; roles that Nintendo isn't exactly in need of at the moment. You have community managers for live service games because they are needed to keep the community engaged and to pass what the players are looking for to the devs. Most Nintendo games aren't continuously updated so they don't need to talk to the community as much. They already have social media teams for advertise stuff. And they probably don't need a whole new team for publishing.
 
Dardan Sandiego said:
Ultimately, to companies like Sony these people are just numbers. They acquired 10 studios in the last three years and now they got a few more numbers to tweak because line must go up. Don't be surprised if they start closing down some as well. The same is happening to Embracer and it will also happen to Microsoft post-ABK acquisition. It's just what they do.

welcome to the family
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The company I work with (I am an outsourced employee) just bought another company for 20bill USD... A few weeks after a 10% global workforce cut was implemented as the business is not doing so "well" as expected...
I hope everyone gets back to work soon.
 
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Why do companies seem to regularly say "no layoffs will happen" just a little bit before they begin?
Employees may as well take those words as a sign to head for the hills.
 
Mer.Saloon said:
Why do companies seem to regularly say "no layoffs will happen" just a little bit before they begin?
Employees may as well take those words as a sign to head for the hills.
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To make it seem like it's purely an accident borne of necessity and not the plan the entire time.
 
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Lead composer for Destiny. Some tweets are going around saying that he was laid off as well which would be insane considering his long history with Bungie.
 
Mer.Saloon said:
Why do companies seem to regularly say "no layoffs will happen" just a little bit before they begin?
Employees may as well take those words as a sign to head for the hills.
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It's a pretty standard (and largely empty) promise when a merger occurs. I was part of a layoff following a merger a few years ago. We were told "nothing is going to happen" until things happened.
 
Sony's operating profit has been down for a while now, despite their record revenue, which usually indicates that their costs are massive. All these layoffs from them recently are basically their way of jettisoning some of these costs to maximise their upcoming financials. It really, really sucks that companies can't just be happy with earning a lot of money each year, but hey, the joys of endless growth capitalism everyone.

Even leaving aside the human cost of these moves, it's undoubtedly going to have an impact on the quality of these games. I mean if Salvatori has gone, that's going to be a huge gap. The man gave Destiny so much character with its amazing soundtrack.
 
A lot of the speculation is that The Final Shape was delayed to push the game into Sony's next fiscal year which also happens to be when the new CEO takes over. So the game might not be being pushed for polish but to cook Sony's financials for the next year.
 
They laid off the composer of your successful billion dollar franchise, what is going on with Sony and Bungie?
 
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It's definitely a rough time for the industry, now the boom in demand caused by COVID has died off. Now companies are wanting to reel in their spending as the economic outlook becomes gloomy. Definitely some jitters in the market now caused by huge increases in costs and global uncertainty and this large spate of lay offs could be in anticipation of a lean period coming soon. Really hope people who have lost their job find new work somewhere else soon.

Speaking for Sony specifically, it does seem that behind the scenes changes are afoot. Potentially pressure or inteference from other parts of the Sony business? Perhaps some bigwigs feel that SIE is getting too bloated and expensive to run.
 
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HockeyBird said:
More info from Paul Tassi. Sounds like this was a Bungie management decision, not Sony.

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This is actually much worse. If it was a Sony decision, that would be more understandable as there are probably redundancies within the larger organization, but if its Bungie themselves cutting the jobs before the shares given to employees from the merger vest, this is just outright robbing these employees and consolidating the shares into Bungie's upper ranks.
 
HockeyBird said:
More info from Paul Tassi. Sounds like this was a Bungie management decision, not Sony.

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I don't care who's decision it was. That severance package is garbage. Health insurance evaporates immediately and they lose their vesting options? That is horrible.
 
HockeyBird said:
More info from Paul Tassi. Sounds like this was a Bungie management decision, not Sony.

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But those shares revert to Bungie if you leave, even if you're fired
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So Bungie's laying people off to steal their shares. I actually thought this might be down to leadership incompetence, but turns out it's just management worshiping at the feet of Mammon.
 
wow so this is just bungie higher ups stealing shares from the people who do the actual work? actually disgusting. i'll be sure to steer clear of all projects of theirs for the foreseeable future, not that i was a destiny player to begin with but i know some folks who were interested in Marathon.
 
Quoted by: GAP
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