Game developer Bungie, the original creators of the Halo franchise and later the creators of the popular Destiny games, have just announced huge layoffs that will affect 220 of its team members or about 17 percent of its total current workforce.
In a blog post, Bungie CEO Pete Parsons said the layoffs would affect all of the company, including "most of our executive and senior leader roles." The team members who will be cut will get a generous severance package, according to Parsons.
This decision was made, according to Parsons, because of a number of factors, including the higher costs of developing games along with the current overall economic situation. Parson said that with these factors in place, "it has become clear that we need to make substantial changes to our cost structure."
Another factor that caused Bungie's current issues was that the developer had a number of team members working on incubation projects. Parsons stated:
We eventually realized 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.
However, Parsons stated one of those incubation projects, which was previously announced as a game set in a new science-fantasy universe, will continue. Bungie is working with its owners at Sony to spin off that incubation team and have them form their own development team, under Sony's PlayStation Studios, to continue working on the game. Parsons added that it is also working with Sony to integrate 155 team members directly into Sony Interactive Entertainment over the next several months.
Parsons says that even with these layoffs and changes, Bungie still has 850 team members working on updates to Destiny 2, along with the upcoming extraction shooter Marathon, which does not yet have a release date.
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