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In 2022, Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE) acquired the well-known game studio Bungie for a huge sum of US$3.6 billion. As a star studio that has created well-known products in the industry such as "Halo" and "Destiny", Bungie seems a little overwhelmed after being acquired by Sony.

As early as October 2023, Bungie announced the layoff of more than 100 people. Now, less than a year later, Bungie issued an official layoff announcement on July 31 local time. CEO Pete Parsons stated in the announcement,The number of layoffs reached 220, accounting for about 17% of the total number of studio employees.

Bungie releases announcement

The reason why Sony spent a lot of money to acquire Bungie in 2022 is that they valued their ability to develop service-oriented games, thereby promoting Sony's own multi-platform game development strategy. In GameLook's view, this well-known game studio, which was founded in 1991 and has gone through 33 years, has laid off employees twice in less than a year. In addition to their own reasons and changes in the macro environment, Sony is probably also to blame.

After the "Three Swords", Bungie has reduced its staff by more than 30%

According to the official announcement released by Bungie, their layoffs this time are far more than just firing 220 people. In fact, the layoffs were made three times in total.

The first cut is the obvious layoffs. Bungie will directly lay off 220 employees, accounting for about 17% of the total number of employees in the studio (from this it can be inferred that Bungie currently has about 1,300 employees, and this number will be used later).

The second is that Bungie said it is "deepening its collaboration with SIE (its parent company Sony Interactive Entertainment)" and will integrate 155 positions (about 12% of the total number of employees) into its parent company SIE in the coming quarters.

It is worth noting that the original text of the announcement reads "identify roles for as many of our people as possible", that is, Sony will provide as many positions as possible to Bungie. In other words, the 155 people are likely just positions that Bungie has confirmed to eliminate, rather than job vacancies that Sony has confirmed it can provide. These 12% of employees may still be in an uncertain state of "life or death".

Finally, there is a hidden knife. Bungie mentioned in the announcement that it will separate the new project they are currently incubating - a brand new sci-fi universe-themed action game (it is reported that the project is code-named "Gummy Bears") - from the studio and hand it over to the new studio established by Sony for development.

To put it bluntly, the burden is being passed on to its parent company Sony. The announcement did not disclose the number of people involved in this new project, but Jason Schreier, a well-known Bloomberg reporter, said that about 75 people will follow this new project, leaving Bungie and joining Sony's new studio.

This number may be inferred from the announcement information. As mentioned above, Bungie currently has about 1,300 employees. At the beginning of Bungie's announcement, it was clearly stated that they will only retain two projects, "Destiny 2" and "Marathon", in the future. At the end of the article, it was stated that there are currently 850 people developing "Destiny 2" and "Marathon".That means that after three rounds of layoffs, the total number of people affected is about 450.After deducting the 220+155 people confirmed in the announcement, the remaining 75 people should be those who left Bungie to join the new studio.

It is worth noting that on August 1, Jason added that according to his information source, only about 40 people were transferred from Bungie's new project to Sony's new studio. Some netizens were concerned about the whereabouts of the remaining 35 people, but there is no further news yet.

All in all, Bungie's layoffs have overtly and covertly reduced the size of its staff by about one-third, with the main purpose of focusing all the studio's resources on the two projects, Destiny and Marathon.

Pete Parsons attributed the layoffs at Bungie to rising development costs, industry market shifts, and their own ongoing economic situation. He mentioned that Bungie has been committed to launching three long-lasting global games in the past five years. In order to achieve this goal, they have set up multiple incubation projects, and "each project is led by a senior development leader from our existing team."

This means that their development resources are constantly dispersed, and the removal of core members from the old team may also affect existing products. In fact, the market response to the previous DLC of "Destiny 2", "Destiny 2: Autumn of Light Falls" released in March 2023, was relatively poor, with a positive rating of only 29% on Steam.

After they laid off employees in October last year, the response to the "Destiny 2: Shape of End" DLC launched this year was obviously much better, which made people wonder whether Bungie realized through this incident that they need to focus their development strength.

Pete Parsons also mentioned that their rapid expansion in 2023 (the second year after being acquired by Sony) coincided with the slowdown in global economic growth and the rapid decline of the gaming industry. As a result, Bungie Studios could not afford so many projects and was stretched under the pressure of new and old projects. It chose to cut off the incubated projects and handed the burden to its parent company Sony.

However, players' attitude towards Bungie's layoffs was much more intense. Some players bluntly stated that Bungie has fallen into its current situation simply because they did not do their business well, and those who made project decisions for "Destiny" should be "forever banned from participating in game project decisions."

Some players pointed out that CEO Pete Parsons has spent millions of dollars in the past two years to bid for classic cars for himself. Although this is just a personal hobby of company executives, it is indeed no wonder that players use this to attack Pete Parsons. Sony just acquired Bungie in 2022, and in September of the same year, it was revealed that Parsons began bidding for classic cars.

According to the auction website, he spent approximately US$2.4 million (approximately RMB 17.4 million) to purchase 25 classic cars and motorcycles from September 2022 to June 2024.

Among them, on November 22, 2023, he spent $201,000 to bid for a 1971 Porsche 911S coupe, less than a month after Bungie's first round of layoffs. This incident also attracted fierce criticism from many foreign netizens.

After all, when you find that the company's boss tearfully expressed in an open letter how difficult the company is and how reluctant he is to say goodbye to outstanding colleagues, and then he spends millions to satisfy his personal consumption desires, you can't help but doubt whether the company's management is really focused on the gaming business.

Who is to blame? Sony, the parent company, cannot stay out of this matter

Of course, in GameLook's view, Bungie's drastic layoffs are also closely related to its parent company Sony. The reason for Bungie's substantial expansion in 2023 mentioned in the announcement is probably not, as many people think, that it will start spending lavishly after being acquired by a wealthy giant.

In fact, the company's development goal of "launching three enduring global games within five years" mentioned in Bungie's announcement was most likely influenced by Sony. Because Sony spent $3.6 billion to acquire Bungie in 2022 in order to allow Bungie, which is good at developing online games, to develop first-party service games for Sony.

Sony actually had a strategy to enter the multi-platform game market a few years ago, and among them, long-term operation of games is their focus. As early as the CEDEC Game Developers Conference in 2022, Kenshin Akiyama, director of the Tokyo Global Developer Technology Department of Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE), shared that the online rate on the PS platform is very high now, and the proportion of F2P games on the PS5 is also very high.

At the 2022 Investment Day event,Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO Jim Ryan said that Sony will increase its investment in long-term operating games in the future and launch at least 12 long-term operating games before 2025.

According to Jim Ryan's plan, Sony plans to increase the number of games released on PC and mobile devices to more than half by 2025. As we all know, mobile platforms can basically only run F2P service-based games.

In fact, according to research by Niko Partners, mobile players are basically only adapted to the F2P game model, and among the current global players' game spending, F2P games account for as much as 73.1%. Even on console game platforms where buyout games are the mainstream, player spending on F2P games on PS and Xbox is as high as more than 25%.

This also explains why Sony is in a hurry to develop service-based games, not only because F2P games are the general trend, but also because several service-based games have always occupied the best-selling list of its own console platform (GameLook previously reported that three products of miHoYo are frequent visitors to the best-selling list of the PS store). At the same time, if Sony wants to enter the wider PC/mobile game market, service-based games are a hurdle they must overcome.

The top four best-selling games on PS Japan when "Zero" was launched are all service-based games

So, 12 service games need to be launched before 2025. The time is tight and the task is heavy. Bungie was bought for $3.6 billion to do this, so Bungie incubated several new projects at the same time, and finally it was overwhelmed. It is regrettable that this is not a story of "the greater the ability, the greater the responsibility, and the greater the responsibility", because Bungie has not successfully demonstrated their ability and has not yet achieved results. After being further "exploited" by Sony, they have already sat down on the ground under pressure and returned the burden on their shoulders to Sony.

In short, Bungie's massive layoffs that have caused a sensation in the European and American gaming circles can also serve as a warning to domestic game manufacturers. Domestic game manufacturers, big or small, need to be mindful of the fact that "you can't eat hot tofu in a hurry". When large companies expand into new tracks or open up new markets overseas, they should pay attention to reasonably controlling the expansion speed, and the quality of the projects is more important than the number; small and medium-sized companies should find the right position when entering the market, do a good job of budget management, and avoid the tragedy of projects being unable to continue and being forced to abandon a large amount of sunk costs.

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