I'd demand the money back & tell them to fuck off the ungrateful twats
Bungie Devs Say Atmosphere Is ‘Soul-Crushing’ Amid Layoffs, Cuts, and Fear of Total Sony Takeover
- Thread starter Gamernyc78
- Start date
The knitting classes got me rollin. Welcome to everyone else’s shared pain of surviving in the workforce post covid.
Who'd buy them though , especially for what Sony paid for them
Bungie being owned by Sony but not leveraging Sony assets is a bit foolish on all parties.
If you are going to leverage Bungie for live service experience in some form, as they did with the review panel… ending funding the deviation game and restructuring Tlou Online….
Like dude… Concord has a team of Bungie veterans. With how Bungie had to leverage outside studios for destiny to begin with. I dunno man, how does it not make sense to put all of this underneath the Bungie umbrella.
They grew too big once the Sony purchase happened and clearly weren’t expecting destiny revenues to dip this year or the industry bloodbath. Started multiple projects. Canned Matter. And just announced full development of another idea. I expect everything on hold now other than destiny and marathon.
There’s definitely a reinvention needed. Bungie’s history is riddled with chaos so it’s gonna be interesting to see what the next version is like.
If you are going to leverage Bungie for live service experience in some form, as they did with the review panel… ending funding the deviation game and restructuring Tlou Online….
Like dude… Concord has a team of Bungie veterans. With how Bungie had to leverage outside studios for destiny to begin with. I dunno man, how does it not make sense to put all of this underneath the Bungie umbrella.
They grew too big once the Sony purchase happened and clearly weren’t expecting destiny revenues to dip this year or the industry bloodbath. Started multiple projects. Canned Matter. And just announced full development of another idea. I expect everything on hold now other than destiny and marathon.
There’s definitely a reinvention needed. Bungie’s history is riddled with chaos so it’s gonna be interesting to see what the next version is like.
I remember there was quite a bit of information that came out about how Q&A testers were treated when ABK was under fire for all their workplace issues. There seemed to be an implication that people in that field are often undervalued, overworked, and underpaid - not just at ABK. I don't know if that's true, but there were accounts from several people stating it was their experience. It makes me wonder if the 'release now, fix later' attitude of some companies stems from expecting customers to find and report bugs to some extent.
It would be their contingency in case current boe fucks up and tank the company, sony can step in a salvage whats left. And thats fine, its a $3b investment for sony so hell yea they should have this in place.
If Sony gets full control and ownership, they should cancel all Xbox support and delay PC releases.
So let me get this straight.Bungie bought their independence from Microsoft, making statements that they would be better off on their own, only to sell themselves to Activision, to then buy themselves out again, to make more statements about how they would be better off on their own, to then sell themselves to Sony….
Time is a flat circle I guess.
Time is a flat circle I guess.
Public test servers exist and could answer that in some form. Some players would even love that to preview content early. I’m sure there’s options and benefits to wider testing at some point.
But I’m saying having SIE have a dedicated team of high paid professionals that is used for Destiny, Marathon and concord etc… I mean they’re all online shooters? Is this possible??
I do think reality came crashing hard at Bungie. Nor do I think that’s a bad thing. There was clearly waste too.
I don’t sympathize so much with what companies need to do to survive. We all feel this and know it sucks.
The article apparently has multiple lies or wrong info:
- "Exact details of Sony’s deal to acquire Bungie remain unknown to the public or employees". The details are that Bungie is now a 100% owned SIE subsidiary, but remains as separate publishing label outside PS Studios to continue publishing new games day one in all platforms, unlike PS Studios. Eric Lempel joined their board of directors and Sony paid $2.4B for Bungie for the 100% of the stocks (previously owned by the Bungie employees, so they must know the details of the transaction) + $1.2B in retention bonuses.
- Sony owns 100% of Bungie, so they already are in full control of Bungie. Which means that yes, Sony can change or remove the Bungie board of directors tomorrow, or even fire the 100% of the staff or shut down Bungie if SIE wants.
- Both Sony and Bungie CEOs said that it was Bungie -not Sony- who decided to fire 100 people, the reasons being recent Destiny 2 underperformance and that cuts were made mostly in redundant non-development areas already covered by Sony as part of the acquisition (HR, PR/marketing/CM/sales, QA, IT etc). In fact in this kind of acquisitions normally these departments are normally mostly moved to / merged their global teams, often causing firings due to some people no longer needed.
- It's also normal in any company that if it severely underperforms and need to cut costs, in addition to some firing some bonuses or benefits get reduced or removed. I don't know in which world do they live or who do they think they are if this surprises them.
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MS could get them back and send them to the campus basement to make a Halo game every year. Exactly what they wanted all those years ago.Who'd buy them though , especially for what Sony paid for them
Boot the board and start making single player fps games with multiplayer components again, exclusive.
Seems like the ones fighting for “independence” are the few greedy owners at the top, the devs don’t benefit from their independence at al. People act like sony have some big conspiracy to overthrow bungie are stupid. I think the last thing sony wanted was to have to go in an manage a 1000+ person studio on top of the ones they already have.
Bungie was supposed to be auto-pilot money with additional expertise. They paid over a billion dollars to RETAIN people not fire them
Seems like the ones fighting for “independence” are the few greedy owners at the top, the devs don’t benefit from their independence at al. People act like sony have some big conspiracy to overthrow bungie are stupid. I think the last thing sony wanted was to have to go in an manage a 1000+ person studio on top of the ones they already have.
Bungie was supposed to be auto-pilot money with additional expertise. They paid over a billion dollars to RETAIN people not fire them
Internal Q&A has nothing to do with public tests. Internal Q&A helps to find 99% of the bugs fixed during development. Public tests are done when the game is already mostly complete mostly for marketing, but also to verify some balancing tweaks or similar and detect a few extra bugs. And sometimes to do server stress tests
Internal Q&A can't be replaced with public tests. Internal Q&A testers working in the Bungie offices and outsourcing offices can be replaced by internal Q&A in other SIE offices (whereever they have their testers) and other outsourcing offices.
Big publishers normally have relatively small Q&A teams in their game development studios, and large global Q&A offices where testers are shared among all the games of all their studios. This helps to don't need to fire testers when games or DLCs (as happened with Marathon and The Final Shape) are delayed. And on top of that helps to share related knowledge among their teams.
Testers can test any game, normally don't need to be talented in a particular type of game or have special knowledge about that genre, because they have many cheats and debug options available to do their job, which isn't to play the game and have fun: it's to spot and properly report bugs, indicating as accurately as possible the steps/actions needed to reproduce that bug.
Sony already has 100% control and ownership of Bungie since the day they completed the acquisition. Bungie is a fully owned SIE subsidiary. So they must obey whatever SIE mandates them and their main decisions are overviewed and approved by SIE. Even if they'll keep their publishing label and -like all other PS Studios teams- have creative freedom for their games.
One of the reasons of why they bought Bungie was to get money from the other consoles and PC, to increase the SIE revenue generated outside PS, so never wanted to make the Bungie games exclusive. Similar with MS's acquisition of Minecraft, Zenimax or ABK.
And Bungie recently underperformed in terms of revenue, so they need to increase their revenue. To cancel Xbox versions and delay PC versions would instead do the opposite, to further reduce Bungie's revenue, which would cause having to fire even more people.
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Biggest waste of money. With nearly $4B they could have bought an iconic publisher with e.g. Sega. Or Fromsoftware + CDPR. Bungie is a creative loss. Old Jimbo strikes again.
Sony once again showing that they seem to have no clue what they're doing when it comes to acquisitions. M$ is spending nearly $100 billion to remove 3rd party devs from the competition, and what does PlayStation do? They go buy one of the most notoriously cantankerous developers who have had issues with every single publisher that's owned them, AND they have to agree that said dev's games will stay multiplatform in order for the sale to go through. All that for a whopping $3.6 billion. Great work, Sony.
Hopefully once Jim Ryan is officially gone in 2024 and Bungie crashes and burns we can forget this era ever happened.
Sad because all of this would be excusable if they were still releasing good games but Sony has shown us 0 gameplay so far from first party studios.
I mean, you sold out to Sony. Why wouldn't they control you?
Horrible purchase.
Horrible purchase.
Even with this year’s revenue underperformance D2 still has better engagement than either Overwatch or Diablo … and those came out this year. Outside of the BRs, Roblox and Minecraft the only game more succesful is Siege. (Console space)
Question is will they buy themselves out from Sony? Highly doubt it but as much as layoffs suck it's on Bungies hands that they are at where they are right now. If anything Sony gave them a chance they split the board 50/50 to be fair. It's not like they're Microsoft that can continually eat losses and still keep running.
I mean they have either 2 routes at this point
Pro: Sony takes over and helps direct the company to a hopefully better direction.
Con: Sony sells or outright dissolves the company to remove any further losses.
Call me heartless but they have had numerous chances to turn their situation around.