Rodeo Roadrunner
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Oct 26, 2020
Surprised there isn't a Bungie specific thread honestly. Not that I am super caught up on all the shit that happens with modern game devs, but Bungie is one of the absolute worst studios over the last several years in terms of lolcow behavior and potential. The idea that any new game from them would be good after the past 5+ years of nonsense from them is absurd. I'll go over some of the highlights from Bungie specifically, then make another post about Marathon and what has happened with that.
This will be a very long post, sorry about that. I am breaking it up with spoilers the best I can. If some mod or someone wants to try and take this info and make a thread on Bungie proper then go ahead.
Want to throw a shoutout at the end to all the posters over on the /dg/ general for documenting a lot of this and making some great memes, should have saved more of them since I never thought 4chan would actually end. RIP to 4chan vg boards.
If someone wants me to make a TLDR for this I can do some highlights if people don't want to read my 5k+ word post. Also the Marathon deep dive (and what has gone wrong so far since many posters have missed stuff) will be coming in a few days, shouldn't take me as long to make as this post since I don't have to source so much stuff and archive so much.
This will be a very long post, sorry about that. I am breaking it up with spoilers the best I can. If some mod or someone wants to try and take this info and make a thread on Bungie proper then go ahead.
Note that I am a long time Destiny 2 player, so I have been paying attention to this stuff for quite a while. For those that know about the downfall of Destiny, I never bought an expansion on release. I didn't buy Lightfall until is was sale for $2, only got that expansion for the exotic Final Warning. The only reason I still play the game is that genuinely, the raids and dungeons are unlike anything else in first person games today. If other games had content like that I would switch, but no other looter-shooter does content like raids or dungeons.
Bungie was one of the first major gaming studios to hop fully onboard with DEI initiatives and policies. Even before they made a big public deal about it, there were significant nods towards it going back to even Halo 3/Reach days, with the Q&A stuff on their forums bringing some of this up. However, it became a big public facing deal over the last 5 years, with Bungie setting up multiple internal groups to celebrate DEI membership. The first one announced was around the time of the infamous "Summer of Love". Called 'BLACK@Bungie, [A] this was the first of many "Inclusion Clubs" that Bungie would foster. The name would soon change to "Inclusion, Diversity, and Equity Associations" (IDEAs, get it bigots?). This wasn't the first time Bungie had done something like this, but it was the first really big public facing example. Note that with BLACK@BUNGIE, and all subsequent IDEAs, Bungie would promote this with in-game Destiny 2 emblems, pins you could buy at their store, and charity links. Below is the in-game emblem that you could get a code for if you bought the $15 pin from their store. At the time, the money spent would be donated to the Equal Justice Initiative, [A] (I can't find anything from Bungie officially on that since it was never archived), now it goes to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
In-game emblem appearance.
Some notes from the article talking about BLACK@Bungie:
Bungie employees need allies internally to help foster 'de culture'.
The founder of the internal Bungie group, Kareem Shuman, thinks that it is very important to tackle the problems of racial injustice in the workplace. Let's check out what he has been up to.
According to his LinkedIn, he was at Bungie until July 2023, where he was moved to Insomniac studios as part of the large Bungie layoffs that month (more on those layoffs later). Also, he views DEI as so important to him that he just puts it in his about section on LinkedIn. Definitely a guy dedicated to sound design and not someone that will focus on politics in the workplace. (I can't archive LinkedIn pages so a link and screenshots will have to do.)
Kareem also wants to help BLACK representation wherever he can, and he can take Bungie money with him. This article from 'Essence' magazine [A] talks about how a Bungie team, led by Kareem, worked with Yale university to develop an algorithm for animating KINKY BLACK HAIR, since the lack of such things is a "prejudice inherited by modern computer graphics technologies." Bungie even donated over $1 million dollars to Yale's Engineering school for support for "anti-racist graphics research."
The announcement of the first IDEA at Bungie was followed up with a bunch of announcements the same year, with the second IDEA announced being TRANS@Bungie [A]. The date (March 31st) was of course "International Trans Day of Visibility". Some highlights from the announcement article:
Good thing that there are enough trans people at Bungie that new trannies feel right at home!
The studio remodel needs to accommodate the needs of people who cut their dicks off.
The emblem and pins they made for this. Note that the pride emblems are V1 and V2. The V1 had existed for a while before, they updated it with the trans colors after their announcements.
Benefits from the sale of the pins goes to TransLifeline.
Next up is WOMEN@Bungie [A]. Funny how they announced trans stuff before actual women. Anyway, women didn't even get an in-game emblem, but they did get a pin. They finally added an ingame emblem this year. [A]
Soon after the WOMEN@Bungie announcement, in September 2021, Bungie CEO Pete Parsons (more on him later) announced that as a studio, they will do more to tackle inequalities across the board [A]. This was preceded by all the news about Activision/Blizzard and all the sexual harassment that had happened recently. The following are goals set out by Pete to promote the work of DEI:
On the same day, they also announced Accessibility@Bungie [A]. This was less about a specific group, and more those with disabilities, and focusing on things like colorblind notes. Personally, this is one of the least negative things I am writing about, as they did actually do things that positively affected gameplay. The Bungie colorblind modes were (and are) pretty industry-leading, and the change they made to semi-auto weapons (making them fire at maximum rof when the trigger is held down) was actually a good gameplay change. Note that the person who was a founder of the club, was only at his third week at Bungie. Already making political statements and he wasn't at the company for a month.
In-game emblem and pin.
There would be a gap year for announcements related to IDEAs, but that didn't mean they weren't hard at work [re]making Bungie in their own image. In 2022, BLACK@Bungie released a statement about the "terrorist attack" by Payton Gendron on May 14th 2022 [A], where he shot up the mostly-black grocery store. Note, there was no reason for Bungie proper to release a statement on this, since they didn't do anything similar for any other mass shooting incident. They simply did this to make a moral stand about the evil of "racists" or some such.
In May 2023, Bungie announced Asians@Bungie [A]. The group had been formed in 2021, "in response to rising discrimination and violence against AANHPI communities." They don't mention that this violence was specifically black people beating up asians over COVID paranoria.
The pin and in-game emblem:
I actually like the emblem, shame it is tied to one of their silly DEI clubs.
June 2023 they announced "Pride@Bungie" [A]. Bungie had always been doing things with gay people, but this was the first time the internal group was announced. They finally gave the LGBTQ+ people their in-game emblem. Money goes to the "It Gets Better Project", which is some charity for queer youth (how nice).
Check out some highlights from their announcement article:
The year before, in 2022, Bungie had made a big announcement about gays on National Coming Out Day [A], where they released colored wallpapers featuring queer characters from the series. The Bungie article has broken links to the wallpapers they made, but they are available on the Forbes article from Bungie shill Paul Tassi [A]. Funny enough, people had been noting that there are more FAGGOTS in the Destiny universe than there are straight people, and Paul even brings that up:
We will learn more about Osiris and Saint-14 (and the writer Robert Brookes) later. I am not going to go into detail here about those characters here, but the "queer representation" is actually so prevalent in game that it is shocking when there are straight characters or romances.
In September 2023, Bungie announced two more IDEAs. The first was "Veteran Vanguard" [A], a group of employees that are former Veterans. Note they they did not opt for the '@Bungie' moniker, I imagine because former military personal found that stupid and gay. They got a pin and emblem, reminiscent of paratroopers.
The second one announced was Latin@Bungie [A]. Time to note here, that the IDEA groups had always received some backlash from the community, because every one of these articles seemed to indicate that Bungie was more concerned with social issues rather than, you know, making video games. None received more backlash than this one however, since it came after the disastrous launch of Lightfall, which saw player sentiment at an all-time low. The playerbase was very concerned with the future of Destiny, and another DEI program was not something they cared about. Especially since in the announcement for Latin@Bungie on Twitter, they used a strange and bizarre nomenclature for hispanics, the now famous "Latin/a/e/o/x" nomenclature. Bungie was completely obliterated on Twitter, so much so that they started hiding comments. Note the insane ratio, and the fact that they got community noted MULTIPLE TIMES for this.
Since this initial post, nothing more has been announced regarding Latin@Bungie. This also marked the end of the larger postings related to IDEAs, with the only one I can think of being a smaller mention in a post this month announced "MentalHealth@Bungie" [A] (lol).
In-game emblem appearance.
Some notes from the article talking about BLACK@Bungie:
Bungie employees need allies internally to help foster 'de culture'.
The founder of the internal Bungie group, Kareem Shuman, thinks that it is very important to tackle the problems of racial injustice in the workplace. Let's check out what he has been up to.
According to his LinkedIn, he was at Bungie until July 2023, where he was moved to Insomniac studios as part of the large Bungie layoffs that month (more on those layoffs later). Also, he views DEI as so important to him that he just puts it in his about section on LinkedIn. Definitely a guy dedicated to sound design and not someone that will focus on politics in the workplace. (I can't archive LinkedIn pages so a link and screenshots will have to do.)
Kareem also wants to help BLACK representation wherever he can, and he can take Bungie money with him. This article from 'Essence' magazine [A] talks about how a Bungie team, led by Kareem, worked with Yale university to develop an algorithm for animating KINKY BLACK HAIR, since the lack of such things is a "prejudice inherited by modern computer graphics technologies." Bungie even donated over $1 million dollars to Yale's Engineering school for support for "anti-racist graphics research."
The announcement of the first IDEA at Bungie was followed up with a bunch of announcements the same year, with the second IDEA announced being TRANS@Bungie [A]. The date (March 31st) was of course "International Trans Day of Visibility". Some highlights from the announcement article:
Good thing that there are enough trans people at Bungie that new trannies feel right at home!
The studio remodel needs to accommodate the needs of people who cut their dicks off.
The emblem and pins they made for this. Note that the pride emblems are V1 and V2. The V1 had existed for a while before, they updated it with the trans colors after their announcements.
Benefits from the sale of the pins goes to TransLifeline.
Next up is WOMEN@Bungie [A]. Funny how they announced trans stuff before actual women. Anyway, women didn't even get an in-game emblem, but they did get a pin. They finally added an ingame emblem this year. [A]
Soon after the WOMEN@Bungie announcement, in September 2021, Bungie CEO Pete Parsons (more on him later) announced that as a studio, they will do more to tackle inequalities across the board [A]. This was preceded by all the news about Activision/Blizzard and all the sexual harassment that had happened recently. The following are goals set out by Pete to promote the work of DEI:
On the same day, they also announced Accessibility@Bungie [A]. This was less about a specific group, and more those with disabilities, and focusing on things like colorblind notes. Personally, this is one of the least negative things I am writing about, as they did actually do things that positively affected gameplay. The Bungie colorblind modes were (and are) pretty industry-leading, and the change they made to semi-auto weapons (making them fire at maximum rof when the trigger is held down) was actually a good gameplay change. Note that the person who was a founder of the club, was only at his third week at Bungie. Already making political statements and he wasn't at the company for a month.
In-game emblem and pin.
There would be a gap year for announcements related to IDEAs, but that didn't mean they weren't hard at work [re]making Bungie in their own image. In 2022, BLACK@Bungie released a statement about the "terrorist attack" by Payton Gendron on May 14th 2022 [A], where he shot up the mostly-black grocery store. Note, there was no reason for Bungie proper to release a statement on this, since they didn't do anything similar for any other mass shooting incident. They simply did this to make a moral stand about the evil of "racists" or some such.
In May 2023, Bungie announced Asians@Bungie [A]. The group had been formed in 2021, "in response to rising discrimination and violence against AANHPI communities." They don't mention that this violence was specifically black people beating up asians over COVID paranoria.
The pin and in-game emblem:
I actually like the emblem, shame it is tied to one of their silly DEI clubs.
June 2023 they announced "Pride@Bungie" [A]. Bungie had always been doing things with gay people, but this was the first time the internal group was announced. They finally gave the LGBTQ+ people their in-game emblem. Money goes to the "It Gets Better Project", which is some charity for queer youth (how nice).
Check out some highlights from their announcement article:
The year before, in 2022, Bungie had made a big announcement about gays on National Coming Out Day [A], where they released colored wallpapers featuring queer characters from the series. The Bungie article has broken links to the wallpapers they made, but they are available on the Forbes article from Bungie shill Paul Tassi [A]. Funny enough, people had been noting that there are more FAGGOTS in the Destiny universe than there are straight people, and Paul even brings that up:
We will learn more about Osiris and Saint-14 (and the writer Robert Brookes) later. I am not going to go into detail here about those characters here, but the "queer representation" is actually so prevalent in game that it is shocking when there are straight characters or romances.
In September 2023, Bungie announced two more IDEAs. The first was "Veteran Vanguard" [A], a group of employees that are former Veterans. Note they they did not opt for the '@Bungie' moniker, I imagine because former military personal found that stupid and gay. They got a pin and emblem, reminiscent of paratroopers.
The second one announced was Latin@Bungie [A]. Time to note here, that the IDEA groups had always received some backlash from the community, because every one of these articles seemed to indicate that Bungie was more concerned with social issues rather than, you know, making video games. None received more backlash than this one however, since it came after the disastrous launch of Lightfall, which saw player sentiment at an all-time low. The playerbase was very concerned with the future of Destiny, and another DEI program was not something they cared about. Especially since in the announcement for Latin@Bungie on Twitter, they used a strange and bizarre nomenclature for hispanics, the now famous "Latin/a/e/o/x" nomenclature. Bungie was completely obliterated on Twitter, so much so that they started hiding comments. Note the insane ratio, and the fact that they got community noted MULTIPLE TIMES for this.
Since this initial post, nothing more has been announced regarding Latin@Bungie. This also marked the end of the larger postings related to IDEAs, with the only one I can think of being a smaller mention in a post this month announced "MentalHealth@Bungie" [A] (lol).
The Destiny story has been bad for a long time. You could even question if it was ever good, considering Bungie executives trashed Joe Staten's original story months before Destiny 1 launched. However, the story really tanked a few years ago, and two of the biggest contributors to that are Robert Brookes (writer) and Marin Miller (voice actor).
Robert Brookes:
Robert Brookes was brought on at Bungie in March of 2020. Previously they had worked at Paizo for the Pathfinder RPG. Robert started working on Lightfall, but one of the first things they did was to make sure that Osiris and Saint-14 were in a gay romance.
The gay romance between these two characters came out of nowhere, because it did come out of nowhere. In the series prior to this, they had always been described as brothers, and very close friends. There was no mention of any romantic feelings anywhere. However, Robert decided to, quite literally within months of joining Bungie, insert his gay fanfiction into the narrative of the game, hijacking entire characters and storylines in the process. It would take too long to go into detail about how pervasive Osiris and Saint's romance became, but there were multiple seasons, cutscenes, and entire plots of Lightfall dedicated to making sure that the player was aware how much Osiris and Saint loved each other, and how gay they were.
Robert arguably hijacked multiple other characters and storylines as well, since they are partly responsible for turning Clovis Bray into a super evil guy for no reason, responsible for making sure that Ana Bray was in a romance with a STRONG BLACK WOMAN, and doubling down on Mara Sov being a lesbian pining for Sjur Eido.
Now, Robert works for CDProjekt Red, as a senior quest designer for the Cyberpunk 2077 sequel. Always failing upwards for people like Robert.
Marin M Miller:
This "person" was the voice actor for Nimbus, the flagship new character and location vendor for Lightfall, the expansion that almost killed Destiny 2. Marin is non-binary, and has voiced quite a few characters in anime according to their IMDB, in addition to their work in games like Dragon Age: Veilguard and Hades.
Nimbus was proudly marketed as non-binary leading up to the expansion release. Upon release, Lightfall was a complete disaster. While the gameplay was...decent, the atrocities committed to the story were unforgivable. Nimbus was a big contributor to how angry the fanbase was on release, with the character's Marvel-esque tone ruining a lot of the serious end-of-the-world story that Lightfall was trying to tell. You can see how much damage this did with how negative the game's rating is on Steam.
I don't really know of a way to communicate how badly the story of Lightfall or the character of Nimbus fucked up the game without going way off into the lore and stuff, but a good indicator would be how the shill review sites rate it. IGN gave Lightfall a 6/10, which is a pretty serious indicator to me that even the Bungie checks clearing couldn't stop reviewers from realizing how bad the expansion was.
All of this is mainly the fault of the Nimbus character, and the voice acting/delivery of the character. An example is shown below.
The non-binary and overall faggot nature of the character is basically a self insert for the voice actor Marin. Unfortunately, she deleted her twitter a while ago, and the tweets were never archived that I know of. However, below are some examples of the type of nonsense this person put out there on twitter.
In an interview with "Gayming Mag" [A], Miller describes the approach that Bungie wanted to portray Nimbus:
Bungie finds the most absolute trash examples of characters to like huh?
Miller (and the Bungie team) ACTUALLY THOUGHT NIMBUS HAD GOOD CHARACTER DESIGN AND WAS ATTRACTIVE:
The tweet chain above is messed up since the "lex luddy" person protects their tweet, but "K Jouet" (who now works for Sony) the tweet is still up.
Effectively, Bungie was so insulated from what makes a good character that they completely destroyed their own canon and universe for "your hotness" "zaddy" Nimbus. Since the release of Lightfall, Bungie has barely mentioned or done anything with Nimbus, as even they recognize what a failure that character was.
Robert Brookes:
Robert Brookes was brought on at Bungie in March of 2020. Previously they had worked at Paizo for the Pathfinder RPG. Robert started working on Lightfall, but one of the first things they did was to make sure that Osiris and Saint-14 were in a gay romance.
Robert arguably hijacked multiple other characters and storylines as well, since they are partly responsible for turning Clovis Bray into a super evil guy for no reason, responsible for making sure that Ana Bray was in a romance with a STRONG BLACK WOMAN, and doubling down on Mara Sov being a lesbian pining for Sjur Eido.
Now, Robert works for CDProjekt Red, as a senior quest designer for the Cyberpunk 2077 sequel. Always failing upwards for people like Robert.
Marin M Miller:
This "person" was the voice actor for Nimbus, the flagship new character and location vendor for Lightfall, the expansion that almost killed Destiny 2. Marin is non-binary, and has voiced quite a few characters in anime according to their IMDB, in addition to their work in games like Dragon Age: Veilguard and Hades.
Nimbus was proudly marketed as non-binary leading up to the expansion release. Upon release, Lightfall was a complete disaster. While the gameplay was...decent, the atrocities committed to the story were unforgivable. Nimbus was a big contributor to how angry the fanbase was on release, with the character's Marvel-esque tone ruining a lot of the serious end-of-the-world story that Lightfall was trying to tell. You can see how much damage this did with how negative the game's rating is on Steam.
I don't really know of a way to communicate how badly the story of Lightfall or the character of Nimbus fucked up the game without going way off into the lore and stuff, but a good indicator would be how the shill review sites rate it. IGN gave Lightfall a 6/10, which is a pretty serious indicator to me that even the Bungie checks clearing couldn't stop reviewers from realizing how bad the expansion was.
All of this is mainly the fault of the Nimbus character, and the voice acting/delivery of the character. An example is shown below.
The non-binary and overall faggot nature of the character is basically a self insert for the voice actor Marin. Unfortunately, she deleted her twitter a while ago, and the tweets were never archived that I know of. However, below are some examples of the type of nonsense this person put out there on twitter.
In an interview with "Gayming Mag" [A], Miller describes the approach that Bungie wanted to portray Nimbus:
Bungie finds the most absolute trash examples of characters to like huh?
Miller (and the Bungie team) ACTUALLY THOUGHT NIMBUS HAD GOOD CHARACTER DESIGN AND WAS ATTRACTIVE:
The tweet chain above is messed up since the "lex luddy" person protects their tweet, but "K Jouet" (who now works for Sony) the tweet is still up.
Effectively, Bungie was so insulated from what makes a good character that they completely destroyed their own canon and universe for "your hotness" "zaddy" Nimbus. Since the release of Lightfall, Bungie has barely mentioned or done anything with Nimbus, as even they recognize what a failure that character was.
Bungie has long overspent their money and mismanaged their projects. Activision famously had to help Bungie finish the Forsaken expansion, and in documents from the FTC-Microsoft court case [A], Microsoft indicated that a danger of a potential acquisition of Bungie had risk related to Bungie's "high-burn rate" of cash. Microsoft would know as well as anyone, since Microsoft used to own Bungie of course. So why did this not raise red flags for Sony, when they purchased Bungie in 2022 for 3.7 billion dollars? Well, it is my belief that Bungie was proverbially cooking their books to make themselves more attractive to potential buyers, and purposely hid the real financial condition of their studio from Sony. Let's start with a timeline:
2019:
Jim Ryan is promoted to CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment. This will be important later.
Late 2020:
Bungie releases "Beyond Light" the expansion that sunset old weapons and armor in Destiny, going back on the long-standing promise of "you can keep your gear". This is a massive negative change with a largely negative response. The seasons for this expansion also drag on, as this is when COVID was heating its peak. The next expansion, "The Witch Queen" ends up being delayed by several months as they struggle to finish it.
2021:
Bungie actually goes on a hiring spree since COVID is now in full swing, and remote work is basically implemented industry wide. The lead up to "The Witch Queen" is also surprisingly good, and preorders are at an all-time high, as will be revealed early into 2022. Despite the remote work expansion, Bungie decides to spend an unknown amount of money on the physical expansion of the studio in Bellevue, Washington, increasing the floorspace from 84,000 to 208,000 sq. ft. [A]
Sony also purchases Firewalk Studios in April, notably for what would later be called Concord, though at the time the game was unnamed publically. Firewalk Studios was cofounded by former Bungie creative director Ryan Ellis.
2022:
January:
Sony announced that they will be purchasing Bungie for 2.6 billion dollars. [A] This amounts to about $4 million dollars per developer at Bungie, and was in my opinion, massive overpayment. However, in the announcement from Sony about the purchase, the reasoning becomes clear in the first paragraph:
Sony purchased Bungie not just for Destiny and other projects, but for "their approach to live game services." This ties into what Jim Ryan, CEO at SIE, wanted to do with Sony's properties: turn them into live service games. Jim Ryan even did an interview about this the same day with GI.biz [A].
February:
Bungie finally releases "The Witch Queen" expansion to Destiny 2, and it is received very well by fans. Hailed as the best expansion since Forsaken, it is also praised as having a very strong story along with good gameplay and balance changes.
Sony does their Q3 earnings presentation, and in there they detail some of the finances behind the Bungie acquisition. One of the key points, is that 1.2 billion dollars of the 3.7 billion dollar figure is earmarked for employee retention, in deferred payments to employee shareholders [A].
Bungie also assured their employees that there will be "absolutely no layoffs" and "no major restructuring" once the acquisition by SIE is finished. Of course, this will shown to be a lie less than a year after the deal is completed.
March:
Sony did their Business Segment briefing, where they go over their various businesses and plans. In it, Jim Ryan presented the plans for Sony's upcoming live service games, and they have huge plans moving forward into 2025, with up to 12 live service games planned.
Notice how prominently Bungie is featured here: Bungie is portrayed as the studio that will help lead Sony's push into live service games, and help them guide Sony's other projects in this regard. Bungie themselves are aggressively pushing themselves with incubation projects, with up to 4 new games planned [A], and multiple multi-media projects related to Destiny. Some of the projects teased at this time are a rumored "Project Gummy Bears", which is supposedly a light hearted isometric MOBA/Smash-Bros project, a Destiny mobile game, an extraction shooter, a Destiny hero shooter, and a Destiny competitive pvp game.
2023:
February:
Lightfall released at the end of February. It is an unmitigated disaster for a variety of reasons, even though player count broke records at launch, simply because players were excited for the new expansion based on how strong Witch Queen had been, and the previous seasons story. Overall sentiment for the game hits new lows. The coming months see precipitous player declines.
May:
Bloomberg (Jason Schreier) publishes an article [A] going over the The Last of Us Online troubles at Sony and Naughty Dog. Apparently, the team working on the live service spin-off of The Last of Us is being scaled down dramatically, as Sony loses faith in the long-term viability of the project. The most interesting element here, is that in the article, there is a reference to Bungie being asked to look at the project, and Bungie had concerns about the success of the project.
This is the first notice that Bungie acquisition is affecting other projects within SIE proper.
Additionally, Marathon is revealed to the public for the first time in the form of a ViDoc (since removed from Bungie's offical Marathon channel, more on that in the Marathon post) and reveal trailer. Overall this was received positively by the community.
October:
On October 30th, Bungie began notifying employees of layoffs. [A] Most only had notice due to a notification on the internal Bungie calendar. The total layoffs were around 8% of the company, around 100 jobs. Many of the layoffs occurred in the QA departments, social media departments, and other non-developer personnel. However, there were plenty of layoffs of people that had been with Bungie for decades, including Michael Salvatori, one of the main composers of music for Bungie (along with former employee Marty O'Donnel) and Lorraine McLees, who had been a concept artist and designed the original Halo logo.
New information would come out on the 31st. Weeks prior, Bungie had told Sony execs that revenue was running 45% below projections for the year. This is a massive revenue miss. Marathon (which had been revealed in May) was going to be delayed until 2025, and the next Destiny expansion, The Final Shape, was delayed an additional 3 months. Paul Tassi on twitter had additional info about the layoffs, saying that this was a Bungie decision, not Sony. The way employee benefits work, they turn over at the end of the month, so non-health insurance benefits would end with 1 days notice. The crucial information is that many of the employees fired still had unvested shares in the company as a result of the Sony sale that had concluded just over a year prior. Those shares would vest based on total years at the company, and if you left (including termination) then those shares would revert to Bungie. Many of those fired would lose all those shares that they had been promised.
This to me is the most key thing, in combination with the realization that many employees fired had been some of Bungie's most long-standing and loyal employees. I have no doubt in my mind that those people had the largest outstanding unvested shares, due to some of them working for Bungie since the early 00s, and they were let go so Bungie themselves would avoid having to pay those employees significant compensation from the Sony sale. Anyone that has experience in corporate America will recognize this happens with mergers and acquisitions; often times long-standing employees are terminated during sales to avoid paying them large compensation packages, while executives remain untouched.
The hits kept coming. On November 1st, the major Destiny livestreamer and youtuber Aztecross in a livestream (subsequently in a youtube video) that earlier in the year, Bungie held a summit of content creators, mostly Tarkov players, where they showed off Marathon and had them playtest it. When Bungie asked if anyone would play the game if it came out tomorrow, "no one raised their hand." More disastrous information for the upcoming, now-delayed game.
December:
IGN published an article with quotes from anonymous employees, describing the increasingly hostile atmosphere within Bungie itself. They describe some of the cost-cutting measures Bungie was implementing, including reducing knitting classes and cooking classes from monthly to quarterly (yes, Bungie had corporate knitting classes). One of the damaging revelations was that the "chief people officer" said that layoffs were a "lever" that the company would pull again. This despite the 1.2 BILLION dollars that had been earmarked during the Sony purchase for employee retention. The most damaging revelation by far though, was that when an employee asked during a post-firing Q&A session if leadership was going to take salary cuts to prevent layoffs. The unnamed department head said that "Bungie was not that kind of company." The Bungie executives admitting that even though their product strategy wasn't working and they were failing, they weren't interested in taking the smallest amount of financial responsibility.
2024
April:
"Into the Light" is released for Destiny 2. It is a mini-content update free to all players, bringing back many classic weapons, and bringing a new limited-time raid-encounter event that was very popular. Bungie also teases The Final Shape content and players finally get a chance to see what Bungie had been working on. It is important to note at this point that The Final Shape had been marketed as "the end of the ten-year saga of the Light and the Dark." Basically, this expansion was marketed as the end of the main Destiny story that had begun back at the beginning of Destiny 1.
June:
The Final Shape is released. The expansion is received very favorably, with both the press and players rating the expansion as one of the best in Destiny 2's history. Personally, I didn't think it was the best, but it was quite strong, certainly better than the previous expansion Lightfall.
July:
Bungie is hit with more layoffs on the 31st. This time, 17% of Bungie's workforce was fired directly, with an additional 12% of Bungie's workforce to be absorbed into different studios under SIE proper. This is effectively a 30% workforce reduction at Bungie, absolutely massive layoffs. These layoffs affected the entirety of Bungie, including the boardroom. One of the most affected departments was the music department, which now saw every single composer who has worked on the Destiny music laid off except for 1 person. The music for Destiny had always been considered a strong point, even when the story and gameplay was mediocre to poor. Jason Schreier at Bloomberg had a good article discussing the layoffs [A]. Also to note, the stock options vesting from the Sony acquisition also applies here, with many long-term employees being fired and missing the vesting stock options.
One of the main complaints against Bungie was that they had expanded too rapidly, had taken on too many projects, and had overrepresented their value to Sony before Sony purchased them. In an article from Game File [A] several former employees said that Bungie execs had overstated their value to Sony to encourage them to buy at a higher price. Additionally, in the Bloomberg article, Jason Schreier described how after the Sony acquisition, Bungie had expanded dramatically and started incubating multiple new projects, which in the layoffs were effectively all cancelled except for Marathon, and the project known by it's codename Gummybears, which was actually handed over to Sony in the wake of the layoffs in a new spin-off studio.
Kotaku [A] has a good article with a bunch of former employees calling for Pete Parsons to resign over the increasingly apparent mismanagement of the company at the highest level.
Also, the same day the layoffs were announced, it was discovered [A] that Pete Parsons had an account on the website "Bring A Trailer", a car auction website. On the website, just under his own declared cars, he had spent over $2.3 million dollars on cars since the Sony acquisition had been announced. Obviously, he probably could have afforded this collection even without the Sony acquisition, as the CEO of a billion dollar company. The optics are horrendous though, especially in the wake of reports that company leadership had refused to take paycuts even while the company was under serious financial strain.
Summary and Conclusion:
It is my belief that Pete Parsons, and the rest of the executive committee, purposefully misrepresented their financial situation and number and quality of projects to get Sony to pay a higher price for the company, solely so Pete and the rest of the executives could get more money, at the expense of the health of Bungie proper. They also misrepresented their expertise in running live service games, portraying themselves as leaders in the industry capable of guiding other studios, and Sony bought this lie. Sony then put Bungie in a position to analyze other SIE live service projects, and PURPOSELY SABOTAGED projects that Bungie viewed as threats to their own position within SIE (the negative analysis of The Last of Us Online). Then, wanting to keep as much money and control of Bungie for themselves, Pete Parsons and the rest of the main executives started laying off some of the most long-term employees, since they would be the ones that would have not just the largest compensation packages, but also the largest amount of shares in Bungie. This would also allow them to take some of that $1.2 billion dollar "employee retention" money and turn it further into compensation packages for themselves. Then, in late 2023 and 2024, when the entire gaming industry was going through layoffs and even the then-CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment Jim Ryan had to fall on his sword and resign after his lie-service push had failed, Pete Parsons kept himself and other board members in charge of Bungie to continue to receive large compensation packages. Even after almost everyone else in public-facing director roles had been fired or left (including the Game Director of Destiny 2, who left months before the launch of The Final Shape), Pete is still in charge at Bungie. I have no doubt that he will remain the CEO until SIE forces him to resign or fires him, so Pete can get the maximum amount of Bungie shares vested into his account. If I were at Sony (the main corporation, not SIE) I would break out the financial forensics and start investigating exactly where my $3.7 billion dollars went when I bought Bungie, and how it could go so wrong in less than 2 years.
2019:
Jim Ryan is promoted to CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment. This will be important later.
Late 2020:
Bungie releases "Beyond Light" the expansion that sunset old weapons and armor in Destiny, going back on the long-standing promise of "you can keep your gear". This is a massive negative change with a largely negative response. The seasons for this expansion also drag on, as this is when COVID was heating its peak. The next expansion, "The Witch Queen" ends up being delayed by several months as they struggle to finish it.
2021:
Bungie actually goes on a hiring spree since COVID is now in full swing, and remote work is basically implemented industry wide. The lead up to "The Witch Queen" is also surprisingly good, and preorders are at an all-time high, as will be revealed early into 2022. Despite the remote work expansion, Bungie decides to spend an unknown amount of money on the physical expansion of the studio in Bellevue, Washington, increasing the floorspace from 84,000 to 208,000 sq. ft. [A]
Sony also purchases Firewalk Studios in April, notably for what would later be called Concord, though at the time the game was unnamed publically. Firewalk Studios was cofounded by former Bungie creative director Ryan Ellis.
2022:
January:
Sony announced that they will be purchasing Bungie for 2.6 billion dollars. [A] This amounts to about $4 million dollars per developer at Bungie, and was in my opinion, massive overpayment. However, in the announcement from Sony about the purchase, the reasoning becomes clear in the first paragraph:
Sony purchased Bungie not just for Destiny and other projects, but for "their approach to live game services." This ties into what Jim Ryan, CEO at SIE, wanted to do with Sony's properties: turn them into live service games. Jim Ryan even did an interview about this the same day with GI.biz [A].
February:
Bungie finally releases "The Witch Queen" expansion to Destiny 2, and it is received very well by fans. Hailed as the best expansion since Forsaken, it is also praised as having a very strong story along with good gameplay and balance changes.
Sony does their Q3 earnings presentation, and in there they detail some of the finances behind the Bungie acquisition. One of the key points, is that 1.2 billion dollars of the 3.7 billion dollar figure is earmarked for employee retention, in deferred payments to employee shareholders [A].
Bungie also assured their employees that there will be "absolutely no layoffs" and "no major restructuring" once the acquisition by SIE is finished. Of course, this will shown to be a lie less than a year after the deal is completed.
March:
Sony did their Business Segment briefing, where they go over their various businesses and plans. In it, Jim Ryan presented the plans for Sony's upcoming live service games, and they have huge plans moving forward into 2025, with up to 12 live service games planned.
Notice how prominently Bungie is featured here: Bungie is portrayed as the studio that will help lead Sony's push into live service games, and help them guide Sony's other projects in this regard. Bungie themselves are aggressively pushing themselves with incubation projects, with up to 4 new games planned [A], and multiple multi-media projects related to Destiny. Some of the projects teased at this time are a rumored "Project Gummy Bears", which is supposedly a light hearted isometric MOBA/Smash-Bros project, a Destiny mobile game, an extraction shooter, a Destiny hero shooter, and a Destiny competitive pvp game.
2023:
February:
Lightfall released at the end of February. It is an unmitigated disaster for a variety of reasons, even though player count broke records at launch, simply because players were excited for the new expansion based on how strong Witch Queen had been, and the previous seasons story. Overall sentiment for the game hits new lows. The coming months see precipitous player declines.
May:
Bloomberg (Jason Schreier) publishes an article [A] going over the The Last of Us Online troubles at Sony and Naughty Dog. Apparently, the team working on the live service spin-off of The Last of Us is being scaled down dramatically, as Sony loses faith in the long-term viability of the project. The most interesting element here, is that in the article, there is a reference to Bungie being asked to look at the project, and Bungie had concerns about the success of the project.
This is the first notice that Bungie acquisition is affecting other projects within SIE proper.
Additionally, Marathon is revealed to the public for the first time in the form of a ViDoc (since removed from Bungie's offical Marathon channel, more on that in the Marathon post) and reveal trailer. Overall this was received positively by the community.
October:
On October 30th, Bungie began notifying employees of layoffs. [A] Most only had notice due to a notification on the internal Bungie calendar. The total layoffs were around 8% of the company, around 100 jobs. Many of the layoffs occurred in the QA departments, social media departments, and other non-developer personnel. However, there were plenty of layoffs of people that had been with Bungie for decades, including Michael Salvatori, one of the main composers of music for Bungie (along with former employee Marty O'Donnel) and Lorraine McLees, who had been a concept artist and designed the original Halo logo.
New information would come out on the 31st. Weeks prior, Bungie had told Sony execs that revenue was running 45% below projections for the year. This is a massive revenue miss. Marathon (which had been revealed in May) was going to be delayed until 2025, and the next Destiny expansion, The Final Shape, was delayed an additional 3 months. Paul Tassi on twitter had additional info about the layoffs, saying that this was a Bungie decision, not Sony. The way employee benefits work, they turn over at the end of the month, so non-health insurance benefits would end with 1 days notice. The crucial information is that many of the employees fired still had unvested shares in the company as a result of the Sony sale that had concluded just over a year prior. Those shares would vest based on total years at the company, and if you left (including termination) then those shares would revert to Bungie. Many of those fired would lose all those shares that they had been promised.
This to me is the most key thing, in combination with the realization that many employees fired had been some of Bungie's most long-standing and loyal employees. I have no doubt in my mind that those people had the largest outstanding unvested shares, due to some of them working for Bungie since the early 00s, and they were let go so Bungie themselves would avoid having to pay those employees significant compensation from the Sony sale. Anyone that has experience in corporate America will recognize this happens with mergers and acquisitions; often times long-standing employees are terminated during sales to avoid paying them large compensation packages, while executives remain untouched.
The hits kept coming. On November 1st, the major Destiny livestreamer and youtuber Aztecross in a livestream (subsequently in a youtube video) that earlier in the year, Bungie held a summit of content creators, mostly Tarkov players, where they showed off Marathon and had them playtest it. When Bungie asked if anyone would play the game if it came out tomorrow, "no one raised their hand." More disastrous information for the upcoming, now-delayed game.
December:
IGN published an article with quotes from anonymous employees, describing the increasingly hostile atmosphere within Bungie itself. They describe some of the cost-cutting measures Bungie was implementing, including reducing knitting classes and cooking classes from monthly to quarterly (yes, Bungie had corporate knitting classes). One of the damaging revelations was that the "chief people officer" said that layoffs were a "lever" that the company would pull again. This despite the 1.2 BILLION dollars that had been earmarked during the Sony purchase for employee retention. The most damaging revelation by far though, was that when an employee asked during a post-firing Q&A session if leadership was going to take salary cuts to prevent layoffs. The unnamed department head said that "Bungie was not that kind of company." The Bungie executives admitting that even though their product strategy wasn't working and they were failing, they weren't interested in taking the smallest amount of financial responsibility.
2024
April:
"Into the Light" is released for Destiny 2. It is a mini-content update free to all players, bringing back many classic weapons, and bringing a new limited-time raid-encounter event that was very popular. Bungie also teases The Final Shape content and players finally get a chance to see what Bungie had been working on. It is important to note at this point that The Final Shape had been marketed as "the end of the ten-year saga of the Light and the Dark." Basically, this expansion was marketed as the end of the main Destiny story that had begun back at the beginning of Destiny 1.
June:
The Final Shape is released. The expansion is received very favorably, with both the press and players rating the expansion as one of the best in Destiny 2's history. Personally, I didn't think it was the best, but it was quite strong, certainly better than the previous expansion Lightfall.
July:
Bungie is hit with more layoffs on the 31st. This time, 17% of Bungie's workforce was fired directly, with an additional 12% of Bungie's workforce to be absorbed into different studios under SIE proper. This is effectively a 30% workforce reduction at Bungie, absolutely massive layoffs. These layoffs affected the entirety of Bungie, including the boardroom. One of the most affected departments was the music department, which now saw every single composer who has worked on the Destiny music laid off except for 1 person. The music for Destiny had always been considered a strong point, even when the story and gameplay was mediocre to poor. Jason Schreier at Bloomberg had a good article discussing the layoffs [A]. Also to note, the stock options vesting from the Sony acquisition also applies here, with many long-term employees being fired and missing the vesting stock options.
One of the main complaints against Bungie was that they had expanded too rapidly, had taken on too many projects, and had overrepresented their value to Sony before Sony purchased them. In an article from Game File [A] several former employees said that Bungie execs had overstated their value to Sony to encourage them to buy at a higher price. Additionally, in the Bloomberg article, Jason Schreier described how after the Sony acquisition, Bungie had expanded dramatically and started incubating multiple new projects, which in the layoffs were effectively all cancelled except for Marathon, and the project known by it's codename Gummybears, which was actually handed over to Sony in the wake of the layoffs in a new spin-off studio.
Kotaku [A] has a good article with a bunch of former employees calling for Pete Parsons to resign over the increasingly apparent mismanagement of the company at the highest level.
Also, the same day the layoffs were announced, it was discovered [A] that Pete Parsons had an account on the website "Bring A Trailer", a car auction website. On the website, just under his own declared cars, he had spent over $2.3 million dollars on cars since the Sony acquisition had been announced. Obviously, he probably could have afforded this collection even without the Sony acquisition, as the CEO of a billion dollar company. The optics are horrendous though, especially in the wake of reports that company leadership had refused to take paycuts even while the company was under serious financial strain.
Summary and Conclusion:
It is my belief that Pete Parsons, and the rest of the executive committee, purposefully misrepresented their financial situation and number and quality of projects to get Sony to pay a higher price for the company, solely so Pete and the rest of the executives could get more money, at the expense of the health of Bungie proper. They also misrepresented their expertise in running live service games, portraying themselves as leaders in the industry capable of guiding other studios, and Sony bought this lie. Sony then put Bungie in a position to analyze other SIE live service projects, and PURPOSELY SABOTAGED projects that Bungie viewed as threats to their own position within SIE (the negative analysis of The Last of Us Online). Then, wanting to keep as much money and control of Bungie for themselves, Pete Parsons and the rest of the main executives started laying off some of the most long-term employees, since they would be the ones that would have not just the largest compensation packages, but also the largest amount of shares in Bungie. This would also allow them to take some of that $1.2 billion dollar "employee retention" money and turn it further into compensation packages for themselves. Then, in late 2023 and 2024, when the entire gaming industry was going through layoffs and even the then-CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment Jim Ryan had to fall on his sword and resign after his lie-service push had failed, Pete Parsons kept himself and other board members in charge of Bungie to continue to receive large compensation packages. Even after almost everyone else in public-facing director roles had been fired or left (including the Game Director of Destiny 2, who left months before the launch of The Final Shape), Pete is still in charge at Bungie. I have no doubt that he will remain the CEO until SIE forces him to resign or fires him, so Pete can get the maximum amount of Bungie shares vested into his account. If I were at Sony (the main corporation, not SIE) I would break out the financial forensics and start investigating exactly where my $3.7 billion dollars went when I bought Bungie, and how it could go so wrong in less than 2 years.
If someone wants me to make a TLDR for this I can do some highlights if people don't want to read my 5k+ word post. Also the Marathon deep dive (and what has gone wrong so far since many posters have missed stuff) will be coming in a few days, shouldn't take me as long to make as this post since I don't have to source so much stuff and archive so much.
