SIE/PlayStation has multiple subsidiary/brands: Bungie, PS Studios, EVO, etc.
Their idea was to keep the Bungie brand separated from the PS Studios one (not SIE/PS), I assume to make clear the differentiation of PS Studios -with some exception- are focused on PS console exclusives and Bungie are focused on multiplatform games published day one everywhere.
From what Bungie said in the recent Bungie communication yes, TFS has been a success but in the previous year Lightfall underperformed to the point of missing their targets and putting the studio in the red (meaning to don't have profit that year). That previous year they also delayed TFS and Marathon.
Totoki (Sony's COO & CFO, and temporary SIE CEO -so also Bungie- as bridge between Jim and Hermen) got angry and publicly complained -something rare in Japanese folks- about gamedevs (and Bungie in particular) not taking responsability from missing deadlines and budgets.
Being in the red means they spent that year more than what they generated, they had loses instead of being profitable. From there, to become profitable there's two options: to generate more revenue or to reduce costs.
Bungie says TFS was a success, something we saw in the rankings. But apparently wasn't enough. The next Bungie revenue bump will be the Marathon release but maybe it's a year or so away from now. So had to reduce costs, and as Totoki said, take responsability.
These big moves take time, so months later Bungie fired over 220 people, moved 155 people to other SIE offices and around 70 of them that were incubating that new game (who knows if it's Matter or not) moved to create a new studio. Which will be a PS Studios team, not a Bungie one. Sounds to me that these cuts are following orders from Totoki.
It's also worth mentioning that in the recent SIE fiscal year presentation Hermen insisted multiple times -when they never said it before- about that they were going to focus on being very careful and responsible with achieving budgets, deadlines and profitability, matching Totoki's previous words. Totoki is no longer SIE CEO, but he's Sony's CFO (so the head of Sony's financials, not only SIE).
This is almost 450 less people at Bungie, around 550 people if we count the layoff from last year. They are now around the same size Bungie was when was acquired by Sony, between 850-900.
Part of that reduction can be considered as normal to reduce redundancies after an acquisition, and also to bring back the studio to the profit after having growth too much in recent years. But seeing that almost half of the around 450 people they lost this year went to other SIE studios makes you think that it's SIE who did it, as if saying: hey Bungie, you made us spend that money to hire for you that amount of people but you underperformed, delayed stuff and went to the red. So we'll take for us that amount of people, including the team you incubated under SIE.
No, Bungie said that the incubated project moved to PS Studios is an action sci-fi fantasy game, so seems to be a different incubation project out of the different ones they had, assuming that rumored "gummy bears" game ever existed.
Sounds to me that they needed to reduce Bungie's headcout to make the studio more profitable, but to fire less people tried to move some of that people to other SIE teams who had open positions, in a move that also would help them to spread the Bungie knowledge and expertise to other teams.
Regarding the 155 people that moves to SIE, I think it doesn't include the people who moves to create the new studio at PS Studios. Because they said that will remain 850 people working at Marathon and Destiny, and that they moved 155 (12%) to SIE and fired 220 (17%).
If 155 is the 12%, the 100% is 1292 people.
If 220 is the 17%, the 100% is 1294 people.
So pretty likely before the cuts Bungie had 1293 people. We remove from there the 850 that stay, the 220 fired and the 155 moved and there's still 68 left.
We don't know if these 68 people stay at Bungie doing non-Destiny/Marathon stuff or if they are the unspecified amount of people that moved to create the new studio that may or maybe not be included inside the 155 moved people.
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