Bungie is laying off 220 employees, or 17% of its current workforce. This comes after the company laid off 100 people in October, which represents a 40% reduction in its workforce. CEO Pete Parsons says the layoffs are due to increased development costs and economic conditions. He also says that Bungie grew too quickly and had its leadership spread too thin across multiple projects, which caused the quality of its titles to suffer. Bungie is currently working on a new game with PlayStation Studios, which is said to be a science fantasy universe title that is in promising development.
For over five years, it has been our goal to ship games in three enduring, global franchises. To realize that ambition, we set up several incubation projects, each seeded with senior development leaders from our existing teams. 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
Parsons went on to say that Bungie will still make great games with the remaining 850 employees working on Destiny and Marathon, and those goals and ambitions will be discussed at a later date, with the focus on the people for now.
