Bungie Devs Say Atmosphere Is ‘Soul-Crushing’ Amid Layoffs, Cuts, and Fear of Total Sony Takeover

[Eternal_Wings]

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 their 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 have had numerous chances to turn their situation around.

Honestly that would be funny. Sony bought them for $3.6B and Bungie would literally need to pay even more. Would be tbh. the best outcome for Sony

 

[anonpuffs]

Lmao put out a bad product and get the fear of god put in you... just as it should be. I'm all for inclusivity but I find it interesting that the performative wokeness positions are among the first to be cut.

Bungie should be ashamed of what they've become - a factory that produces FOMO to squeeze its players' pockets for every thing they're worth. Give a good game and you'll get good revenue.

 

[Zeno]

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.

Agree. CDPR would have been a much better choice.
Bungie is somehow in a crisis every few years.
Sony should keep the talent, fire the management and get some people from PlayStation in there.

 

[flaccidsnake]

Say what you want about Bungie, I've never been a huge fan of their games. But Destiny has a claim to best fps feel to date. I want them to put it to use in a game I actually care about.

 

[gokuss4]

Everyone on reddit youtube twitter Facebook
Wants sony to take full control of Bungie
Even the ign article didn't make sony the evil one
But of course some xbot fans on era wants to blame and Demonize sony on this situation

 

[On Demand]

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.

MS is not doing anything Sony is doing. They bought ZeniMax and Activision and have removed games from PlayStation and plan on to with Activision. So I don’t know how could you say that. Sony and MS operate completely different.

Sony bought Bungie mainly for gaas experience. Not multi platform money. The only reason Bungie is still making games for PC and Xbox is because that was apart of the deal. Sony would make everything exclusive if they could. I believe they still will do that in the future.

As @Remember_Spinal pointed out….Sony paid an extra $1B so employees would stay. Yet because Bungie didn’t reach whatever revenue point, they (Bungie not Sony) started firing people.

That has no bearing on weather or not Sony would want to make Bungie’s games exclusive.

 

[AshHunter216]

Ryan Mccarthy already outraged at Sony potentially taking over and getting more exclusives.



IMO, that side has no right to be angry if that happens after what MS pulled with these publishers they bought.

 

[Say1nMan]

Fear? Probably coming from the heads of the studio rather than the devs. Remember, wasn't too long ago we heard the Bungie devs were glad that Sony swooped in and bought them cause they were taking issues with decision making that the heads were making.

 

[Yurinka]

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.

They can't buy themselves out if Sony doesn't want to sell. And pretty likely in any case they may not have the money to buy. And Bungie is the one who underperformed and the one who decided to fire people, not Sony.

Thanks to being inside Sony, after having underperformed they are safer because of Sony's money gives them more finantial stability. Without Sony, when under performing would have more trouble.

There's no reason for them to leave Sony as company, even if some some reason some individual, if personally not happy with something,, he could personally leave Bungie and Sony.

 

[Yurinka]

Ryan Mccarthy already outraged at Sony potentially taking over and getting more exclusives.



IMO, that side has no right to be angry if that happens after what MS pulled with these publishers they bought.

I don't understand why some people acts as if SIE never would have bought Bungie.

 

[Vertigo]

I don't understand why some people acts as if SIE never would have bought Bungie.

Same people will claim “Halo is back” at 5 percent of Destiny’s playerbase while it outperforms Halo and both Diablo and Overwatch.

 

[Yurinka]

MS is not doing anything Sony is doing. They bought ZeniMax and Activision and have removed games from PlayStation and plan on to with Activision. So I don’t know how could you say that. Sony and MS operate completely different.

Sony bought Bungie mainly for gaas experience. Not multi platform money. The only reason Bungie is still making games for PC and Xbox is because that was apart of the deal. Sony would make everything exclusive if they could. I believe they still will do that in the future.

As @Remember_Spinal pointed out….Sony paid an extra $1B so employees would stay. Yet because Bungie didn’t reach whatever revenue point, they (Bungie not Sony) started firing people.

That has no bearing on weather or not Sony would want to make Bungie’s games exclusive.

Every single console Minecraft game and dlc released after the acquisition has been released on PS too. Same goes with every single game and DLC from Zenimax and ABK released since the acquisition, with the exception of Redfall and Starfield. They signed that CoD will be on PS at least 10 years, and in 10 years from now they'll negotiate to extend the deal. Sony will be able to get all past ABK games and the ones published in at least 15 years ABK games for their cloud gaming sub.

The $1.2B Sony was going to pay for retention bonues weren't paid when the acquisition was made. Each worker receives its part if they remain there for certain amount of time. If he/she gets fired or leaves before that amount of time, Sony doesn't pay him/her the proportional part. This is how retention bonuses work.

So fired more people = less retention bonuses to be paid. Regarding reasons for firing these around 100 people, when asked in the Q&A of the most recent quarterly financil report announcement, the Sony guy said Bungie decided to fire them as part of the acquisition, because now part of these PR, marketing etc. job will be made at SIE and not in the studio (as happens in the other SIE studios).

To release their games in 3 platforms makes more money than to releasae them in 1 platform, and doesn't make their fans angry. So they'll continue releasing their games in 3 platforms, specially when Bungie underperformed in revenue and when Sony wants to expand their revenue beyond PS.

 

[Danja]

The Bungie hate on this forum is quite weird, that's all I'm gonna say. I don't understand why anyone is rooting for them to fail lol.

At least allow them to fail before pulling out the pitch forks. Destiny 2 is squash... Let's see how Marathon and the New IP turns out and then we'll see if they were a waste of money.

 

[Yurinka]

Fear? Probably coming from the heads of the studio rather than the devs. Remember, wasn't too long ago we heard the Bungie devs were glad that Sony swooped in and bought them cause they were taking issues with decision making that the heads were making.

Fear from the MS fanboy who wrote the article, I'd say.

 

[Cool hand luke]

Every single console Minecraft game and dlc released after the acquisition has been released on PS too. Same goes with every single game and DLC from Zenimax and ABK released since the acquisition, with the exception of Redfall and Starfield.

Hifi rush

 

[rofif]

gaas, subscription, chasing profits, everything has to be huge brand and a tv show.
It's bad.

 

[Umar]

I say let playstaton take over them. So far all they have done since acquired is layoff people release a few expansions for destiny 2 and delayed the last one and delayed marathon. They have been useless so far if you ask me

 

[anonpuffs]

I say let playstaton take over them. So far all they have done since acquired is layoff people release a few expansions for destiny 2 and delayed the last one and delayed marathon. They have been useless so far if you ask me

Don't forget the killed/delayed Factions from naughty dog. They've been a negative addition so far

 

[Umar]

Don't forget the killed/delayed Factions from naughty dog. They've been a negative addition so far

Yes I forgot that. They havent contributed at all in a positive way .

 

[Would_you_kindly]

Every single console Minecraft game and dlc released after the acquisition has been released on PS too. Same goes with every single game and DLC from Zenimax and ABK released since the acquisition, with the exception of Redfall and Starfield. They signed that CoD will be on PS at least 10 years, and in 10 years from now they'll negotiate to extend the deal. Sony will be able to get all past ABK games and the ones published in at least 15 years ABK games for their cloud gaming sub.

The $1.2B Sony was going to pay for retention bonues weren't paid when the acquisition was made. Each worker receives its part if they remain there for certain amount of time. If he/she gets fired or leaves before that amount of time, Sony doesn't pay him/her the proportional part. This is how retention bonuses work.

So fired more people = less retention bonuses to be paid. Regarding reasons for firing these around 100 people, when asked in the Q&A of the most recent quarterly financil report announcement, the Sony guy said Bungie decided to fire them as part of the acquisition, because now part of these PR, marketing etc. job will be made at SIE and not in the studio (as happens in the other SIE studios).

To release their games in 3 platforms makes more money than to releasae them in 1 platform, and doesn't make their fans angry. So they'll continue releasing their games in 3 platforms, specially when Bungie underperformed in revenue and when Sony wants to expand their revenue beyond PS.

Hi-fi rush