At time of writing (31st of October 2023) a large swath of Bungie employees working on Destiny 2 have been let go. These include Social Media Lead Griffen Bennet and both Community Managers Liana Ruppert and Sam Bartley as well as long-time composer for Destiny 2, Michael Salvatori. Anyone whose either been an active player in the Destiny community for long enough or been fortunate enough to interact with any of the above names would know how much passion and effort they've put in for years. Personally, I can distinctly remember when Liana's name began signing off the 'This Week at Bungie' blogs and the balance of genuine fun and passion with professionalism was something I always liked, as well as the little hidden images that they'd embed in the text as they signed off. Michael's work is heard and loved throughout the game with 'Deep Stone Crypt' becoming an iconic track from the moment player got to experience it. This news comes alongside the delay of Destiny 2's final announced expansion, The Final Shape, until June of 2024, 4 months on from its previous February 2024 deadline. Bungie has independently developed and published Destiny since its split from previous publisher Activision-Blizzard in 2019 and was acquired by Sony in a deal reportedly worth $3.7 billion in July of last year. To their part, Activision-Blizzard was acquired by Sony's main competitor Microsoft in a deal valued at $68.7 billion in January of that same year, a deal which has only finalized in the past few months. In a Bloomberg article by Jason Schreier, its confirmed that 100 people were let go after executives told employees that revenue was running 45% below projections due to low player retention. Staff were told during this meeting that cost cutting measures such as salary and hiring freezes would be in effect and to weather the storm, leaving employees 'determined to do whatever was needed to get revenue back up'. The layoffs are part of a larger money-saving initiative at Sony's Playstation wing as other studios such as Naughty Dog and Media Molecule, as well as Playstation's own San Mateo office have been let go. So far this year, over 6000 people in the gaming industry have been let go.
Bungie has always had an extremely rocky relationship with its community since Destiny's launch. Whether it was complaints about the lack of narrative content at its launch, the sweeping changes made to the core systems in Destiny 2's first year, the decrease in content quantity after the Activision split, the exhausted seasonal model, the overturned launch of Stasis or the currently dying carcass that is the PvP community, to say nothing of the fully buried and forgotten Gambit, Bungie and the wider Destiny fanbase have had a volatile relationship. The easiest catch-all the community use as metaphor is an abusive romantic relationship, full of broken promises and trust issues, which is a comparison I mention here to both give you an idea of where the community at large is at and to say that its not a metaphor I'm very fond of. I have used it in the past with friends when I was younger but honestly, it's become fairly tasteless in recent years. The relationship between game developer and game players is a totally different beast that changes from genre to genre. The fandom of a single-player series like Fallout, Hitman and so on, were the games launch tends to be the most content you'll get for the games lifecycle are in different conversations then live-service games such as Destiny or World of Warcraft where there's always more stuff around the corner that can be changed based on community feedback. There's much more incentive to keep in contact with a community like Destiny where you're in it for the long haul than with a community like, say, Alan Wake II, where the launch and fan response over the coming weeks is the most interaction the fandom will get until the next entry. The game comes out, we play it and we move on to the next. Bungie has to navigate the toxic sea that is online discourse surrounding Destiny thats but a drop in the ocean of online discourse about video games, pick out the bits of feedback or fan work or bug reports that they can do something with and avoid getting involved with the miasma of those who'd rather complain that their politics aren't reflected in the game or that their favourite gamemode being ignored warrants the death of developers. The balance of what's too much and too little communication is a hard one to walk as too little leaves a community abandoned whereas too much leaves the developers exposed to some extremely nasty people. It's a balance I've always thought the social media and community teams at Bungie walked fairly well, with the odd stumble here and there, as tends to be the way with a lot of Destiny.
All that being said, and with my retrospective of Destiny now getting its own deadline pushed back, I thought I'd take the time to address an elephant I've spent the last few years ignoring to give context to the rest of this piece.
In my own opinion, the wider Destiny community has been, for lack of a better term, pretty dogshit since the Activision split. Whereas there has always been critiques to make of the franchise, I've always felt that the community tends to go hard on points that either aren't super impactful to the wider game or are outright irrelevant. Occasionally, it feels as if there's simply too much loss in translation between what is said by Bungie in 'This Week at Bungie/ This Week in Destiny' blogs and what the community takes away. Personally, I think a vocal portion of the community have never really understood what the split from Activision actually meant in terms of both creative freedom and loss of manpower nor do they seem to understand how much of a miracle it is for Destiny, or any game, to actually make it to market given how absurdly hard it is to make a video game. Bungie themselves have spoken on their history of a toxic work environment and the efforts to remedy that and the industry-wide issue of crunch is almost certainly in affect at the studio. This isn't me attempting to play devil's advocate for Bungie but to draw attention to the fact that the blame for all of Destiny's issues tends to fall on the more public faces of the development team when the actual problem lies at the top. Bungie's developers aren't lazy, I think the sheer passion and love that goes into the game that a lot of people tend to ignore is evidence of that. All that is to say, I've long since distanced myself from the daily discourse of the community as I found it unhealthy with a lot of bad-faith actors simply looking to argue and whinge to pass the time. However, with recent events being what they are, it's pretty easy to find common ground.
Game development is an expensive process, that's no secret. When you have a live-service game, with a development team working full weeks to keep it active and come up with new content, that price only gets higher. So from the business side of things, I can understand needing to find new avenues of income. If Bungie doesn't make money, the staff can't be paid. The problem comes in what staff are being paid. Those at the top have salaries that I can guarantee don't reflect the work they put in and that fact that instead of cuts to their pay or increases to the salary of those developers in the trenches, people who live and breath Bungie were let go is unacceptable from every angle. From a business standpoint, losing long-time community managers, faces people know and voices people trust, is a massive hit to Bungie that they simply cannot afford to take at the moment. Destiny's final announced expansion, The Final Shape, is set to conclude the narrative Bungie have been telling for a decade and a large portion of the community will take the opportunity to bow out of the franchise and move on. After the negative reception of the previous expansion Lightfall, as much as I disagree with that reception, it should be imperative to try boost the playerbases morale and get them excited for what's to come. Between what was a good, not great reveal for The Final Shape and how the following years content hasn't really been addressed beyond a change in format, that morale is at a dangerous low. Bungie is speeding down the tracks to the fireworks factory finale of its largest IP since Halo and the passengers on board their train are more interested in disembarking than the fireworks. To then go and remove some of the most well-liked faces in your once-award winning Community Management department is a guaranteed death knell for the community's hype.
That's all from a business and advertising standpoint, things' I'd like to imagine Bungie pays their top brass to consider before making big decisions. From what I consider the more important standpoint (basic human decency) laying off 8% of your workforce going into the holiday season after reassuring them that the $3.6 billion deal you made won't result in said lay-offs, due to a fall in revenue that's a direct result of upper management mistakes is reprehensible. I've done my best to be a lot less passionate and somewhat professional in this piece given the on-going and sensitive nature of all this. Those 100 people, not just Liana and Sam and so on, are all humans with their own lives that have been upturned by surprise cuts. Some are going to struggle with rent, medical bills and gods knows what else. All have been left adrift with some basic severance pay Bungie has to pay in order to not get sued to hell and back which as nice as that is, its not even the bare minimum.
As stated in the opening, 6000 people have lost their jobs in the gaming industry alone this year. Bungie is simply the most recent offender. Rightly, a lot of people have been mentioning Geoff Keighley, host of the Game Awards and numerous other gaming events, in posts asking for some semblance of a mention in the upcoming awards show. As the biggest night in the gaming industry where a lot of those not tuned into the news will be watching, that sort of voice would be immense. However, personally, given both Keighley's own interviews about the difficulty of funding the events leading to an increase in sponsorships and my own distrust given how neutral and passive a stance he's taken in the past, I don't believe this is likely to occur. The other option people have begun amplifying after years of vocal support is a mass unionization of the games industry which I believe is the best solution. The gaming industry is only becoming more and more mainstream with multiple extremely successful movie and television adaptations attracting more eyes and more money. To say there's simply 'not enough to go around' is an outright lie and simply put, the industry has put up with way too much shit for way too long. My personal hope is that this eventually leads to strikes like the recent Writers Guild of America and ongoing Screen Actors Guild strikes to force the higher-ups in the scene to start making changes.
Back in when the Activision split was announced, I was willing to concede extra missions or weapons for Bungie gaining creative freedom with the franchise they built from the ground up. I would have rathered the devs write the story they wanted to tell than another few years of whatever Activision thought would sell. Now as The Final Shape looms not as close as it once did, but still close, I am genuinely wondering if I want to be on the train when it arrives. The phrase 'the old Bungie is dead' is thrown about whenever there's a major community upset but for the first time, I feel like this is the end of an era. The Final Shape is supposed to conclude this story of Light and Darkness, of the forces of hope and life entering the final showdown with those of entropy and death and whatever adventures come after. This will be the last stop for a large portion of the community. I can't help but wonder if it's the last stop for Bungie as well.
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