It's a sad case of another day, another round of mass layoffs at a game studio. On this occasion, Destiny developer Bungie has announced it is letting go of 220 employees, or 17% of its workforce. CEO Pete Parsons said the eliminations were due to "financial challenges," which isn't going down well, especially after it was discovered he may have spent over $2.4 million on classic cars after Sony acquired the company, and continued buying them even after the previous layoffs.
Bungie blames the job eliminations on "rising costs of development and industry shifts as well as enduring economic conditions." The Sony subsidiary says it needs to make substantial changes to its cost structure and focus development efforts entirely on Destiny and Marathon.
The cuts will impact every level of the company, including executives and senior leader roles – but not Parsons, obviously.
It was only in October 2023 that Bungie made its last round of layoffs, and the news comes just under two months since the launch of Destiny 2: The Final Shape, which has been well-received.
In December, Bungie devs told IGN that the atmosphere at the company was "soul-crushing" due to fears of more layoffs, extra cost-cutting measures, and a loss of all independence from Sony if Bungie's financials did not improve. Staff said earlier this year that they feared more job cuts were coming.
The latest layoffs have led to many angry posts on social media from current and former Bungie employees. Destiny 2's global community lead Dylan Gafner (AKA dmg04) called the move "inexcusable," and noted that it's a case of "Accountability falling upon the workers who have pushed the needle to deliver for our community time and time again."
What's angering people even further is the discovery of what seems to be Parsons' account on a car bidding site called Bring a Trailer. It shows he has spent $2.4 million on classic cars since September 2022, which includes $500,000 since the October layoffs.
There was a fantastic write up on Reddit 6 or 7 years ago where a person that rubbed shoulders with the rich explained the drastic differences in behavior between different strata of the rich. He cited there are absolutely those that spend excessively to try to appear more rich than they are. I think the net worth of this category was between $20 million and $200 million (those numbers are from memory). Above that those rich largely don't do that anymore, and are surprisingly more practical. If someone has a link to that, I'd love a re-read of it. It was very eye opening.
I was awarded a patent that was going to make mine and the company it supported a lot of money. (Of course I didn’t get any of it, but whatever) I was invited to go have steaks with the customer company and to pack some comfortable clothes, spend a few days in Texas. What I didn’t realize was who was going to be there.
We didn’t have steaks in the normal way of let’s sit down at the fancy building and eat. It was the board of directors, those guys who own the company. They wanted to take the engineers out for a few days. When the management and CEO tried to come along, they did a “why are you talking to us? Get back to work”. They wanted to hear about how we came up with this stuff.
Took their Suburban convoy out to an oasis country club and we were given some pants and new shirts. Nothing special I thought, but they were some special member’s club gift they give out. We went shooting, and their shotguns cost more than my house. Told them I feel weird holding it. “Nah! If you drop it it’s fine! Can get another one”
These guys had more money than I could fathom, but none of it seemed show-off, Gucci handbag level stuff. It was all made to look like nicer stuff you would buy from Macy’s. It was all custom tailored just for them. They didn’t need to show off to each other at that point. It was a fun couple of days. We stayed there, I had a room all to myself that was more like a master bedroom than a hotel.
I tried to find out where breakfast was and the staff laughed. “It’s ok, what would you like? We will bring it to your room.”