Bungie lays off another 220 staff, acknowledging it was "overly ambitious"

Bungie is laying off 220 developers. That's 17% of its overall headcount.

Bungie boss Pete Parsons says the cuts are needed "to make substantial changes to our cost structure and focus development efforts entirely on Destiny and Marathon."

"This morning, I’m sharing with all of you some of the most difficult changes we’ve ever had to make as a studio," Parsons wrote in a statement posted to the studios' official website.

"Due to rising costs of development and industry shifts as well as enduring economic conditions, it has become clear that we need to make substantial changes to our cost structure and focus development efforts entirely on Destiny and Marathon."

"These actions will affect every level of the company, including most of our executive and senior leader roles," Parsons added.

"Today is a difficult and painful day, especially for our departing colleagues, all of which have made important and valuable contributions to Bungie. Our goal is to support them with the utmost care and respect. For everyone affected by this job reduction, we will be offering a generous exit package, including severance, bonus and health coverage," the statement continued.

"I realise all of this is hard news, especially following the success we have seen with The Final Shape. But as we’ve navigated the broader economic realities over the last year, and after exhausting all other mitigation options, this has become a necessary decision to refocus our studio and our business with more realistic goals and viable financials."

Parsons added that as of today, an additional 155 roles are moving into Sony Interactive Entertainment – that's around 12% of its staff – to "deepen [Bungie's] integration [with Sony]."

Another 75 people again are moving to work "with PlayStation Studios leadership to spin out one of our incubation projects – an action game set in a brand-new science-fantasy universe – to form a new studio within PlayStation Studios to continue its promising development."

"SIE has worked tirelessly with us to identify roles for as many of our people as possible, enabling us together to save a great deal of talent that would otherwise have been affected by the reduction in force," Parsons said.

On top of the 100 employees made redundant last November, that means Bungie's headcount has fallen from 1300 to around 850.

Parsons then took time to talk candidly about how Bungie "got here."

"For over five years, it has been our goal to ship games in three enduring, global franchises. To realise that ambition, we set up several incubation projects, each seeded with senior development leaders from our existing teams. We eventually realised that this model stretched our talent too thin, too quickly. It also forced our studio support structures to scale to a larger level than we could realistically support, given our two primary products in development – Destiny and Marathon," he explained.

"Additionally, in 2023, our rapid expansion ran headlong into a broad economic slowdown, a sharp downturn in the games industry, our quality miss with Destiny 2: Lightfall, and the need to give both The Final Shape and Marathon the time needed to ensure both projects deliver at the quality our players expect and deserve. We were overly ambitious, our financial safety margins were subsequently exceeded, and we began running in the red."

Consequently, Parsons said Bungie had to "change course and speed", and whilst the team "did everything we could to avoid today's outcome", even with "exhaustive efforts" undertaken across our leadership and product teams to resolve our financial challenges, "these steps were simply not enough."

"As a result, today we must say goodbye to incredible talent, colleagues, and friends.

This will be a challenging time at Bungie, and we’ll need to help our team navigate these changes in the weeks and months ahead. This will be a hard week, and we know that our team will need time to process, to ask questions, and to absorb this news.

"Today, and over the next several weeks, we will host team meetings and town halls, team breakout sessions, and private, individual sessions to ensure we are keeping our communication open and transparent.

"There will be a time to talk about our goals and projects, but today is not that day. Today, our focus is on supporting our people."