Bungie promises to address the 'uncertainty' surrounding the future of Destiny 2 following massive layoffs last week
It hasn't been a good couple weeks for Bungie. At the end of July, the Destiny 2 studio laid off 220 employees, representing roughly 17% of its total workforce; shortly after that, a report surfaced alleging that Bungie CEO Pete Parsons had spent more than $2.4 million on vintage cars over the past two years; and shortly after that it came to light that hopes of avoiding layoffs by really nailing The Final Shape expansion were completely misplaced, because the cuts were reportedly planned regardless of the expansion's outcome.
Bungie is under pressure from Sony to get its house in order, but it seems increasingly unable to. Parsons acknowledged when the most recent round of layoffs landed that the studio was overextended on various «incubation projects» and was bleeding money as a result, but it's unclear how it's going to pull out of that spiral. The Final Shape is intended to be the final Destiny 2 expansion, but the nigh-inevitable Destiny 3 is still a long way out, and Marathon, presumably the studio's next big thing, is struggling: The game recently underwent a leadership change, and Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier said in a recent Friends Per Second podcast that he's been told the current state of development is «not great.»
«There's a reason that it was planned for this year and slipped a whole year,» Schreier said. «People that I've talked to are a little pessimistic about it even hitting its current planned deadline, but we'll see. I don't know exactly when that is—sometime in 2025, I'm not sure. I mean, the sentiment I've heard is not great around it. At least as of a few months ago.»
Bungie's future has never looked as shaky as it does right now, and the Destiny community is understandably down about the whole thing. It's not as though Sony is about to pull the plug on Destiny 2—you don't kill the golden goose you paid $3.6 billion for just a couple years ago—but the future of the series, and the studio that makes it, is a big ol' question mark right
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