It’s another grim day for gaming, as a substantial chunk of one of the industry’s most iconic studios has been hit by layoffs.
Bungie arguably hasn’t felt like the Bungie many of us grew up loving for quite some time now, but that doesn’t make the news any easier to stomach. These are still real people losing their jobs, and it marks another ugly chapter for a studio that once seemed untouchable. More worryingly, it also feels like a prologue to what’s going to happen at Xbox.
A Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification filing with the Washington State Employment Security Department lists 292 Bungie job losses in Bellevue, Washington. The effective separation date is July 9.
That number does not necessarily represent the full scale of the cuts, either. Sony has also said there are reductions across SIE teams that support Bungie’s operations, meaning the overall impact may be wider than the Bellevue WARN filing alone. Previous reports suggested up to half of the studio were facing layoffs, while Paul Tassi said earlier today that around 400 Bungie employees were sitting in the layoff call.
Jason Schreier says the layoffs include “most of the Destiny” team, some of the folk working on Marathon and even some Sony staff that helped Bungie.
In an internal email published by Sony Interactive Entertainment, Hermen Hulst, CEO of Sony’s Studio Business Group, said the layoffs affect “a significant number” of Bungie employees, including “most of the Destiny team” and “some Marathon team members.”
Hulst said the decision followed months of discussion with Bungie leadership, with Sony reviewing Bungie’s long-term direction, development priorities, resource needs and place within the wider PlayStation portfolio.
“We explored multiple alternatives before concluding that a reduction was necessary,” Hulst wrote, saying the cuts were needed to align Bungie’s resources with its current priorities and long-term goals.
Bungie’s own explanation is even more blunt. In a statement, the studio said Destiny 2 “fell short of expectations these past several years,” and that with future projects still in early incubation, it “could not continue operating at our previous size.”
That lines up with where Bungie is right now. Destiny 2 recently received its final live-service content update, while the studio’s focus has shifted toward Marathon. Marathon is far from dead — Sony specifically says it remains an important part of the portfolio — but it clearly has not magically solved Bungie’s problems either. And based on what we learned a few weeks ago, Bungie doesn’t have any other projects currently in development, either.
On top of the layoffs, Bungie Studio Head Justin Truman is reportedly stepping down, according to Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier. That part has not been officially confirmed by Sony or Bungie at the time of writing, so treat it carefully for now. That said, Schreier’s sources are usually very reliable.
Truman only took over last year after longtime Bungie boss Pete Parsons stepped aside, making this another leadership change in what has already been a brutal few years for the studio. We do not know why Truman is reportedly leaving. It may simply be another changing of the guard, or it may be part of Sony’s wider reshaping of Bungie after years of underperformance. Either way, it paints a pretty bleak picture.
This is also not Bungie’s first round of cuts under Sony. GeekWire notes that Bungie has now cut more than 600 jobs across three rounds of layoffs since Sony acquired the studio for $3.6 billion in 2022. That includes roughly 100 jobs in October 2023, another 220 in July 2024, and now the 292 Bellevue jobs listed in the latest WARN filing.
Sony has also taken impairment losses against Bungie more than once, something I’ve covered separately, and today’s news makes that already messy acquisition look even rougher.
For now, Bungie continues. Marathon remains in development, Destiny 2 remains playable, and Sony says it will support affected staff where possible. But there’s no dressing this up: this is a massive blow to Bungie, to the people who built Destiny, and to one of the most historically important studios in gaming.
WGB 