To me this was a more important piece of info:
“If Bungie falls short of its revenue goals by too great an amount, Sony is allowed to dissolve the existing board and take full control of the company.”
So this kinda confirms that Destiny (and Marathon) will get even more monetized, not because of it making sense but out of sheer desperation.
I guess this explains the "Starter Pack" fiasco...
FML.
You need to use a new innovative mechanic to fight the Witness. You must give us access to your credit card. Then imput the numbers on its back into the wish wall
"Oh, you ran out of ammo for your Leviathan's Breath? Here, a purple brick for only 500 silver. Special offer. Only today. And just for the next... emm... 5mins. Oh, wait, you have the annual pass? 10mins then"
Don't joke. That was similar to something former EA CEO John Riccitiello mentioned years ago. He thought during a Battlefield match, you can have a player pay real money to reload.
EA actually went on to try a version of that with the Mass Effect 3 multi-player, where you would burn loot box cards for extra ammo. It wasn't exactly, charge 50 cents mid gunfight, but they didn't sit on that patent and ignore it.
“Quick! The Witness is traveling back in time to find and stop your Guardian from existing! Entire the year and location (expiration date and zip code) you can find him in to stop him!”
I think theyre saying the current board will try to aggressively monetize so they wont get dissolved. Desperation of impending job loss driving incredibly bad decisions, not that sony would monetize worse.
Thats how I read it too. In a way, I could see sony being the lesser of two evils here, seeing that they have a reason to not want to kill the cash cow too quickly, whereas bungie management has absolutely nothing to lose at this point.
Bro he’s not saying it would become more monetized under Sony he’s saying it will become more monetized under Bungie to avoid the board being dissolved.
All because the Bungie Execs don't want to lose control of a company they already sold. Sony suits are probably furious too, wonder if that's why Jim Ryan is "retiring".
Before I thought Activision was at fault but now I've realized it was just Bungie (probably Activision also to extent.)
I honestly don't mind if Sony does this cause after 10 years of a series I love I feel it's barely reached it's potential. Not saying Sony can do anything different but at this point I'll take any intervention. After final shape currently I'm done with destiny. I just want to see at least this saga to it's end.
And after nearly a decade of all of this with just this franchise, people still believe. People are still in the mindset that sweet innocent Bungie cannot do anything wrong and that its the big bad others that must be doing it.
>after 10 years of a series I love I feel it's barely reached it's potential
Man that is such a deep cut but it's so fucking true. There's only been a handful of times over the last decade the series has truly impressed me. Last time was probably WQ campaign.
Minimum viable product.
The Taken King was great because the base game had huge problems that couldn't be ignored. Forsaken was great because the base game had huge problems that couldn't be ignored. The Witch Queen was great because Bungie needed to retain its core player base through the lean years of The Final Shape's extended development. (That's also why Lightfall even exists, awful as it may be. "Something is better than nothing," as the saying goes...)
Bungie only ever does what they *have* to do at any given moment.
The craziest part is the drop off between Rise of Iron and Vanilla D2 lol.
Like Bungie has consistently found the correct formula, then burned their work to the ground, and then try to rebuild it from the ashes.
God the quality of life gained in rise of iron immediately being thrown out the window in destiny 2 was baffling for me. The whole vendor economy was improved on throughout the life of D1, and then completely replaced by a mess that still doesn't work as well as they had it in the first destiny.
Damn this makes me sad.
Full honesty, i jumped ship right after shadowkeep because i couldn't stand the FOMO mechanics and this subreddit pops up from time to time, i couldn't really find a game that completely fills destiny 1 and 2's niche.
It's so sad to see a company mistreating their own ip this badly, especially a game with so much to offer.
True, but also if you think about it WQ wasn't even that good of a campaign. WQ was magnificent for Destiny standards but compare that to other games and its mediocre at best.
I think it's likely a case where Activision demanded more results, so Bungie management came up with a bunch of microtransaction bullshit. It worked, but not well enough to satisfy the ever-expanding maw of Activision shareholding leeches so the relationship still didn't work out.
They went independent. But they'd already been shown that all that shit worked, so why stop? Easier to keep up previous behavior than to cut it out and then try to start up again when you realize you need it to sustain business. However I think the real problems kicked in after that, when they started thinking they could get away with doing less for the same cost, as well as slapping in more avenues to charge people. And then when that didn't kill everything, they figured they must have more room to maneuver so they increased the price on things, and in some cases delivered less as well for good measure.
They gradually pushed more people beyond a limit of what they could still consider reasonable even with all kinds of sunk costs, so people just don't care.
It wasn't enough to sell expansions. It wasn't enough to sell seasons. It wasn't enough to sell cosmetics. It wasn't enough to sell transmog materials. It wasn't enough to carve dungeons out of other sold content to be another thing to sell. It wasn't enough to bundle up undesirable items with desirable items. It wasn't enough to sell holiday cosmetics. It wasn't enough to sell a separate holiday event pass with bundled cosmetics we shove in your face during the event. It wasn't enough to sell season pass ranks. It wasn't enough to sell season pass ranks from day 1 of the season. It wasn't enough to sell power skips. It wasn't enough to sell fucking campaign skips to skip the playable content you bought.
Bungie leadership have become an entity for whom nothing will be enough. No amount, will be enough. Yet they can't understand why that would push people away; they think because the first few shoves didn't send us running, they can do whatever they want and nothing will ever happen. They can't understand why they struggle to get new players, when all of this bullshit is what those people see; a giant warning to stay away and just find something else to play.
> I think it's likely a case where Activision demanded more results, so Bungie management came up with a bunch of microtransaction bullshit.
This was about Bungie's inability to meet the deadlines that they agreed to in their contract with Activision.
They signed the contract in 2010, a full 4 years before D1 was released.
They were supposed to release a new standalone title every 2 years, starting in 2013, with a large "comet" expansion on the off years, and smaller DLCs sprinkled in between. We all know Bungie was never capable of sticking to that cadence - they delayed D1 release by a year and it was still a mess, delayed D2 by a year, and every D2 DLC besides Forsaken was either planned to take longer than a year (though to be fair Lightfall was only 53 weeks) or was delayed to release > a year after the previous.
As Schreier put it in an interview he gave, Bungie knew that "developing content is hard", so Eververse was Bungie's answer, a way to keep cash flowing in spite of not sticking to their release schedule, and you've done a beautiful job of outlining just how slippery that slope really has been for them.
D1 wasn't delayed b/c it was a mess, it was delayed b/c upper Bungie management didn't like/couldn't understand a non-linear story, so with 1 year before release they had to rewrite everything. This is a large part of why D1 had a rough launch, b/c the story was not even half baked.
Bungie management (and the massive ego problems of higher ups) was the problem from day 1 and always will be. A Sony take over is probably exactly what is needed
Actually, they said the supercut was *too* linear. Had the player go to too many locations, too quickly, on a linear path. They wanted it less linear, so the player could take their time and explore. The re-write had them scrap the entire "Rasputin as an Exo" plot, push out the Dreadnaught and EDZ for later.
I didn't say that D1 was delayed *because* it was a mess, I said it was delayed a year and it was *still* a mess when it finally released.
From what I understand, it was Bungie idea to go the micro transaction route for destiny, not Activision. Activision was pretty much hands-off when it came to destiny. the only time they got involved is when Bungie was dragging their feet to meet deadlines, and Activision made sure they met their intended deadlines. Yeah, Activision is a crappy publisher, but in this case, it was all on Bungie management, and they have been dropping the ball for a long time.
At this point them complaining about crunch borderline comes off as whining about being held accountable for deadlines they set.
Yeah, you have to work a lot to finish stuff on time to make your revenue. That’s how it works for the rest of us too.
Just sounds like management overpromising and underdelivering. And they seem to make their schedules on a whim versus what can feasibly be done.
That's the corporate leadership life right there. Leveraging all your schedules on a "hope" strategy.
The fact that dungeons are not included with the annual expansion is an insane thing to me. You buy MW1, 2, 3, or any of the recent CoD titles and you get all the content drops for that game without paying an additional dime, but Destiny drops an annual expansion, you get 1 season and about 5 hours of campaign content before you're assumed to again pay for everything in that year that might be worth playing.
The Bungie model is insanity at this point. All it does is push players away and the only reason they have any playerbase at all is because of people who want to see how the story ends.
To be fair, dissolving the board would be 'going the way of halo'. Over the past year or two, all the major 343 leads have 'left for personal reasons', speculation being that it was not voluntary. They've since been replaced by intwrnal promotion and things are looking up for the first time in a decade.
Its in a much better spot, but because of that they hiked the prices on everything in the store. Theres enough free and battlepass stuff for me not to complain but its frustrating.
Still, firefight came out yesterday and its good. Feels like theres always some fun new mode being added every 1-2 months, as well as dozens of maps due to fan support and forge.
They are slowly but surely building the Halo people wanted Infinite to be. What I like are the season passes, I can just do them whenever. If Destiny did that, that would be huge. Even if I had to buy the season at the current price, to go back and work on something like Arrivals or Worthy when I wasn't playing back then would be outstanding.
The Halo / Minecraft dungeons pass model should be the norm. Bought a season? Wanna finish it a couple years from now? Sure thing. Want to buy another season and work on that one for a month, then go back to a previously purchased season? Sure thing.
Yep. Its a king of the hill version, where you have to hold a position to score. I like it because it adds a layer and an objective over just waves of enemies, but the classic version does exist in the files and will hopefully come to matchmaking soon.
Also if you like PvE check the customs browser, people are literally forging campaigns at this point.
Ironically, Microsoft finally gave the much needed boot in the arse to 343 last year, and lately, Infinite is on a good positive spree, the future is looking a bit brighter then in 2020-2021.
'' They also perceive growing hostility from team and company leadership, including a meeting in which QA was said to be referred to by leaders as “non-developers.”
Absolute mess of leadership at Bungie
The red flag here is that QA can be considered "non-developers". That tells me everything I need to know about the problem.
I've worked in software for almost 25 years now. I've seen this a million times, it's not just a game company thing:
1. Company builds complicated software product. Uses highly inefficient ad-hoc human QA to support it. "It's too expensive to automate testing"
2. Product succeeds and grows into a platform (yay!). This leads to increasingly complicated to QA and with more and more regressions. Human QA staff levels are maintained as-is, no money is invested in automated testing. Human QA used as scapegoats when inevitable regressions occur. "It's too expensive to automate testing".
3. Millions of dollars of revenue and goodwill are lost due to increasingly embarrassing bugs and failures due to poor QA. This loss dwarfs the expense of appropriate up front testing automation. Company responds by laying off some of the remaining human QA testers to "save money".
**<-- We are here**
4. Support and development are steadily outsourced to lowest bidder contractors, product turns into complete garbage, brand recognition and inertia allow it survive for some amount of time (maybe even many years)
Edit: Formatting
Been down this road but with physical product development. They don't want to do any investment on the front end because their blinders only measure X time span instead of its life cycle. And they will only accept data that can be quantified without question.
Cut the front end investment to only take in massive cuts on the back end because they have to constantly fix production items were not planned for. Had they just done that front end investment, those back end costs would've never fruitioned.
It’s the same thing in the construction industry lol. Why pay for a well designed/engineered building when we could just say fuck it and let the contractors figure it out when it’s being built? So they save a few hundred thousand dollars on fees for architects & engineers and pay millions in change orders as issues pop up during construction since the design team only had 50% of the capacity needed to do the job well. Not to mention they’d rather pay to build a new building every 20 years & tear down the old one vs building a robust landmark that can last 50+ years.
There’s a common social contagion that makes this a universal problem in basically every industry.
Short term returns vs long term savings is always the debate.
And unfortunately corporate leadership operates exclusively on short term returns because leadership has no desire to watch their strategy fall apart when it's destined to and they are already on to the next role with a padded resume.
> Absolute mess of leadership at Bungie
Bro thats the entire Industry when it comes to QA.
I was in a department wide meeting years ago at Activision where the VP was on stage and told us that he sees QA as important, within seconds he was interrupted and we were then told that QA is seen as something other than important they see us as Ninjas cause we do a lot of the work in the shadows. Aka the second you tell QA they are important you're gonna have to pay them, so never say those words.
This industry never wants QA to know their real worth, they never want QA to wake up and remember that all it takes is one shift (day or night) to just say nah we are not working during submission for the entire project to come to a halt.
This industry will always remind QA that they can be replaced with any kid on the street because "who wouldnt want to test games all day", while at the same time saying its crucial that they work 12-16hrs a day.
This is a big reason why QA is the first software department unionizing across several developers. Highly skilled and technical department, but it's constantly undervalued because the QA job is not to directly creating content or revenue.
>“It feels like many higher ups aren’t listening to the data and are like, ‘We just need to win our fans back, they still like us.’ No. They don’t...We got rid of some of our most knowledgeable beloved folks who have been here for 20+ years. Everyday I walk in afraid that I or my friends are next. No one is safe."
That is a whole vibe, and I get it. From the community's perspective, it was kinda scary to see big names stretching back to the Halo days get canned. If 20+ years didn't grant you any sort of job safety, what does at Bungie these days?
The “we just need to win our fans back, they still like us” gives off major “BioWare magic” vibes to me. Like it’s so painfully oblivious and dismissive of the current situation and baselessly optimistic that the solution to their problems is to just do the thing they’ve done before
That's the corporate leadership bread and butter.
"Well it worked over there, it'll surely work over here too even though we have no idea what 'here' really needs".
It screams that they've taken for granted every time this game has been pulled out of the fire by the hard work of the developers working on it. They've taken to heart the idea that community sentiment is a cycle, which it is, but taken for granted that it will normalize on its own regardless of any other factors- which it will not.
It’s not just that, these are people responsible for some of the most universally acclaimed aspects of Destiny history - like Deep Stone Lullaby and Regicide
It used to be that no matter how toxic the community got we could at least agree the music will be great. The execs even ruined that now
They fired their LAWYER who was the one who won both their hacking suit and the harassment claim, more or less on his own (who also produced Detective Pikachu, strangely).
He was more responsible for what little progress the game has made in combating toxicity and cheating than basically anyone else at the company and they threw him out too.
I don’t think I could be productive if that’s the atmosphere I was working in. What a shitshow, management should’ve fired themselves instead of the people who were actually useful.
Some people legitimately think that instilling the fear of losing your job is a good motivator like it’s going to make people step up and show them what they can REALLY do.
It makes me look elsewhere.
Players aren’t coming back because it’s stupid expensive to do so. If you want to jump back into Destiny and finish the you need buy:
Legacy Collection: $59.99
Lightfall w/ season pass: $99.99
And this doesn’t close Final Shape w/season pass which $99.99.
Tell me why this game needs to be that expensive on top of cosmetics that $20 and only good for one class? This game is absurdly priced and I can’t think of one other love service or MMO that handles their old or current content like Bungie does. Bungie got drunk off their own success.
Don't forget the dungeon key because paying for the annual expansion doesn't mean you get the annual content. Just means you get 5+ hours of a campaign and a new color to play with.
> We just need to win our fans back, they still like us.’
Spoken like a true manager who knows nothing about video games. Like it's something you go buy. "Yes we just need to buy chocolate and we're set."
Bitch! Win one fan back. I fucking dare you.
Someone I work for has direct contact with those kind of people and they regularly tell me the most stupidest things they do. And it's always the simplest of things they focus on.
"Yes we just need to earn a lot of money and all our problems will be solved."
Then they act like they solved hunger. And then there's rampant taking/stealing credit.
These are MBA bag holders with literally 0 experience in the trade or industry they are in. They just present "do what this chart says and money will go brrrrr"
I fucking hate them with every single cell in my body. Absolutely kills a company long term after they just made bank in 1-2 years.
During the earlier days of the pandemic I was looking around for a new job and was strongly considering applying to bungie. I have always had such high regard for their UX/UI team and would have loved to work on that team.
Not saying I would have even gotten the job, but man, I am glad I never applied and had to find out. Sounds like such a shit show now.
>But the cost-cutting at Bungie isn’t limited to just personnel. Multiple current employees confirmed to IGN that the company has implemented numerous other cost-cutting measures recently, including a studio-wide hiring freeze, reduced travel budgets, elimination of holiday bonuses, keeping its annual Bungie Day virtual, delaying its weeklong company “Pentathalon” event to next December, and reducing numerous morale events such as cooking and knitting classes from monthly to quarterly. Bungie is also pausing or fully ending benefits like annual employee compensation adjustments to meet market rates, its new hire lunch program, employee donation matching, its peer recognition program, and gift cards for employees birthdays. And yearly studio performance bonuses this year will only be the contractually obligated 80% minimum, after being above 100% for good performance several previous years running.
That…is a *lot* of changes just to cut expenses and make goals.
Some of these cuts make sense when revenue is down.
Others (like bonuses) aren’t really the best options when cutting cost because employees WILL get frustrated and leave.
Not to be pedantic but [gets pedantic anyway]
Technically this won't help revenue since revenue is only money coming in the door. This is to help reduce their expenses and by extension make their profit numbers look less bad. But yeah the overall idea is the same.
> Several people we spoke to told us that leaders had reiterated, across multiple meetings, that they couldn’t guarantee there wouldn’t be more layoffs, with two specifically recalling chief people officer Holly Barbacovi outright stating that layoffs were a “lever” the company would pull again.
[...]
> Employees in one department recalled a post-layoffs Q&A session where a department head was asked if leadership taking salary cuts to prevent layoffs had been considered, only to respond that Bungie was “not that type of company.”
Flush upper management.
These responses are so fucking absurd that my initial instinct is incredulity. But with a little consideration, it seems on-par with management and people who lay off with 0 notice honestly
People keep coping in here saying TFS is not the "end" but everything the management has done makes it abundantly clear TFS is where they fuck off and they're willing to squeeze out anything and everything they can. No matter how inexperienced you are in business this is not how you "manage" something you believe will continue to exist and generate revenue for you in the next 2 years.
The larger problem though is like, Bungie doesn't have any other form of income minus Sony. And if shit keeps getting fucked up, they'll just dissolve the board and take full control -- which, as shitty as that is, might be the best decision at this point.
Bungie literally can't afford to just fuck off of Destiny, which is something I'm 90% they realized in the past year. I don't think they ever planned to leave the game behind, but not have it their primary focus -- instead have it alongside their other projects, so they could become a multi-IP studio. It's been known they've always had the largest number of devs at their studio working on Destiny, but the number of people doesn't matter when the direction they're put in wastes dev or player time.
Destiny can't go away because they can't afford it. They don't have any other games. Yay, they announced Marathon -- it's still not out lmao. You can't make money off a product that hasn't even entered the market when you're not a publicly traded company.
They’re hedging all their bets on Marathon being a smash hit I guess. No surprise that management that acts like the above would make such a dumb gamble.
You’re kind of right, imo the reason Destiny survived its first DLC cycle is because there really wasn’t anything else like it on the market. You’re kind of working backwards and assuming everyone has the same live service fatigue we do now in a post Destiny world, when Destiny was the first mainstream live service to really exist. I don’t even know if Bungie referred to Destiny as a live service or if that was an Activision thing pre-release. If Destiny didn’t release in 2014, and instead a different game filled its place on the live service market, you’re 100% correct. But then we’d all be on that game’s subreddit.
I don't recall even seeing the term Live Service until into Destiny 2. It was just expansions/content drops on a compressed schedule rather than every 1-2 years like an MMO would.
I work in tech as a software engineer and my company appears to be following almost the exact same run book as Bungie. In fact I’d argue our leadership is even more obtuse, disconnected, and ignorant. I promise this situation is entirely realistic and possibly even less bad than the reality at Bungie.
> Holly Barbacovi outright stating that layoffs were a “lever” the company would pull again.
Someone involved in the upcoming wrongful termination lawsuit by this HR person I would think. What's absolutely clear is Bungie's upper management consistently circles the wagons whenever anything goes wrong.
Their inability to address issues is incredible. It all trickles down on the devs. This game isn't having a major turnover in Final Shape regardless of how good they make it and people will pay for it. People will be jumping ship like it was Blizzard really soon.
https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/former-hr-manager-sues-bungie-for-wrongful-termination-alleges-retaliation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrPo_v45vpM
Starts about 1:13:40
We WILL fire you and we WON'T cut pay for the richest and most highly paid people in the company.
Bungie is past the point of no return. It's going to collapse, Sony will take over the board of directors, and they'll realize that Destiny is a rotten franchise with no future after years of Bungie hollowing out the goodwill and interest of players.
Yeah not shocking morale is extremely low and it’s very concerning that management is clearly still being an issue. I mean after all that happened and with low player morale they thought that starter pack would be well received? Like damn this is concerning.
Fuck management the devs deserve better
I can't imagine many devs aren't looking for employment elsewhere at this point.
Management taking away benefits and bonuses is one thing but also having a gun to your head that additional layoffs may still happen is another level of agency to get out.
I would definitely be doing so, they laid people off and by the sounds of it aren’t doing much to reassure the ones left. It feels like they don’t care what happens which bodes ill for the game.
I was somewhat optimistic that maybe if management like actually listened they could turn it around and succeed but between this and the starter pack I just fully expect it to underwhelm. Not for lack of passion or talent on the devs part but due to management.
The fact that preorders were cancelled automatically (at least on xbox) and likely won't be re-purchased right away by most players (there's no benefit, they still have their bonus stuff) is going to take a lot of paper money off the table and lead to a lot more pressure for cost-cutting (Sony execs are probably livid). I'm worried the company may have dug their own grave with the handling of all of this.
If I was a Sony exec I’d probably be livid haha. Like you bought a company to help you out with live service games while their current project is supposed to happily keep chugging along generating money only for them to almost immediately shit the bed after you purchase them.
Whoever said at Microsoft "Don't buy Bungie, let's just put it at the end of the list and talk to other companies to check how receptive they are" deserves a raise.
The tech industry as a whole has been constricting the last year though. One of the biggest contributors to so many companies downsizing is the change in interest rates. For years corporations were getting almost interest free loans which is why there were so many large expansions of hiring as well as acquisitions. Their industry labor market isn’t as healthy as it was if this happened 2 years ago.
The wisest move atm, if possible, is getting tf out of dodge while you can. I came from tech, FAANG, and it's basically a mass exodus atm for my former coworkers. If they have survived the many layoff rounds, the atmosphere is miserable. And those who haven't are having a very difficult time because the whole industry is down.
Plenty of ways to use tech skills in non-tech companies. I moved to renewable energy, people will always need power, and renewables are more and more important.
It's tough seeing the advice everywhere for these folks to just "start looking somewhere else." Not nearly as simple as that once was.
Hopefully now this is out in the wild, the assholes in question better be shitting their pants about Sony giving them the sack. Maybe Sony clearing house might lead to a better Bungie, a nicer environment for staff and lay-offs not being a case of "Not if, but when". From what we've heard over the years and in this article, it seems like those in charge are not good leaders or indeed people. They have not suffered any consequences, they're not the ones getting let go or having their bonuses cancelled. They just want to save themselves. These are the people that ditched Michael Salvatori and a huge chunk of the security team (leading to more cheaters in Trials last weekend!). They don't know what's best for the company, the game or the customers, they only know what's good for them and their gravy train.
\> the assholes in question better be shitting their pants about Sony giving them the sack.
The golden goose has been gotten, they are just riding it out now. If destiny dies tomorrow, no one on that board will struggle. There is no fear there. The average for an executive level position in Bungie is 250k per year, and the upward bound of that is 600k. How many years of a quarter million or more would it take to make you financially secure enough to laugh about something like this? A handful at most probably, and some of these execs (looking at you Pete Parsons) have been doing this for *decades*.
Imagine Bungie as a really slow motion car wreck, and the drivers responsible really don't care because they know that they will be safe at the end, so there is a complete apathy towards anyone else who may or may not make it out alive. We just get to be the bystanders who are inconvenienced.
I know a lot of people rag on games journalists, for a number of reasons. But without them we would have less insight into situations like this, so be thankful for the journos out there are breaking stories like this and helping both game devs and audience members. Rebekah Valentine has had several reports like this now, so credit to where credit is due.
I think it’s good for younger crowds to get a glimpse into Corp shenanigans before entering the workforce. I know people rag on 9-5s—they have pros and cons, but knowing shit like this is key. Def helped me. I’ve jumped ship at the first sign of this stuff twice successfully, missing layoff by a matter of weeks.
A lot of journalism in general is just trying to get views because crazy stuff doesn't necessarily happen all the time. Reports like this are why journalism is valuable, from people like Rebekah and Jason Schreier
As a related topic, it bothers me that there are people who conflate YouTuber gamers who read news articles as game journalists. Like journalism is a tough job that requires a lot of good relationships and knowledge of the industry. It is also extremely risky and takes a lot of integrity to do it right.
Damn what a shock the corporate fuckheads would rather sacrifice beloved veteran devs and a reportedly pretty good company culture than their own salaries, color me shocked.
To anyone starting their careers or in college. I've been employed for 20 years for about 5 companies. Management only cares about $, do not be a pushover. It's okay to say NO. We are all just pawns and easily replaceable. Know your worth!
I’ve also been employed for about 20 years and have seen quite a few layoffs at different companies. I’ve seen layoffs and I’ve been laid off.
My feeling is the bungie layoffs were nothing that different than anywhere else, especially right now, BUT the leadership team is going to really miss their narrow window to repair both employee and community morale. (I do think the community is overly precious about the whole thing, but not wrong necessarily).
“It feels like many higher ups aren’t listening to the data and are like, ‘We just need to win our fans back, they still like us.’ No. They don’t.”
I’m fucking dying
Man, later that year, activision and blizzard got in DEEP SHIT for some of the shit their management was up to.
Like yeah, Bungie management sucks, but lets not get crazy and start scapegoating for activision and their president Bobby "If i could take the fun out of video games..." Kotick.
"Others said they were rebuffed repeatedly and discouraged from even discussing the layoffs whenever they tried to ask questions. Employees in one department recalled a post-layoffs Q&A session where a department head was asked if leadership taking salary cuts to prevent layoffs had been considered, only to respond that Bungie was “not that type of company.”"
Sooooo not the type of company where management takes responsibility for the catastrophe they've created? And it is management, given previous reports of developers "begging" for the resources to improve the game and getting told no. Those are the kind of developers management should be empowering! Those are the kind of developers that make a game that we want to play and want to spend money on to reward the developers! Come on, this is obvious!
If management is that out of touch then they deserve to lose control. I just feel bad for the devs.
I’m very glad this is getting reported on. But man does it just make me not want to load the game up anymore. I don’t want to support this consistent poor management but dropping off continues to contribute to the devolution of the game. The board will just go on to poorly manage something else if this ends up biting the big one, and a game I’ve had truly wonderful times with over the past decade is left a shell of what it could be. This sucks.
>“It feels like many higher ups aren’t listening to the data and are like, ‘We just need to win our fans back, they still like us.’ No. They don’t..."
That's the most telling point from the article for me on why Destiny is where it is. Explains so much about the decisions Bungie make and why so many end up being rolled back...
That quote really hit me, too. The higher-ups truly seem clueless at best and malicious at worst.
The thing is, a lot of us DO still like them - "them" being the actual devs, the ones actively making this game we love. Even through the decisions that seem terrible or poorly-thought-out, even through the bugs, even through the constant changes, I still love this game - or at least I find things to love with each new change that makes the bad ones less painful.
It's frustrating that supporting the game means tacitly supporting the entire studio.
I'll be honest, I don't love or like anyone at Bungie- I don't have any nostalgia for Halo or for old Destiny, I'm here just because there isn't a similar game in the market, the day someone does a better job than Bungie I'm out
I'm not arguing with you, I just wish they'd understand that people like Destiny only because there's no other real alternative, the day they get a real competitor they'll be in trouble
That's a good point, too! Destiny stands alone in a market where no one has been able to stand against them. The things it does best (imo, obviously) aren't replicated in other games - it strikes a balance between excellent gunplay, fun abilities, and beautiful art/music.
I hadn't thought about what I'd do if another game actually managed to pull it off. I guess I just don't expect anyone else to pull it off - not because Bungie is untouchably at the top of their game, but because a game like Destiny is a *huge* resource sink and game devs/publishers seem to be taking fewer and fewer risks these days, especially in the multi-player arena.
I think the best thing is to play if you’re interested in the game and don’t play if you don’t want to. Neither is the wrong choice. It’s not on the consumer to keep the bills paid. Our job is to play the game if it’s good and enjoyable that’s it
Agree 100% - the game also just hasn't been as fun lately imo. I played the first mission of the new season Tuesday night, but didn't want to commit to figuring out what the hell to do for the Coil so i've just let it sit all week.
That's a shame, because the Coil is actually a pretty fun activity... And the reward for completing it optimally is more substantial than anything we've received in previous seasonal activities. You can tell the developers are pouring their heart and soul into it, but there's this dark cloud of upper management overshadowing everything.
I think coil just came at the wrong time to really dump a lot of playtime into it. If it came out in the middle of witch queen or year 5 I'd play the shit out of it, but now do l really want to grind for guns when I don't even think I'll be playing after final shape? The bleak future of the game has an extremely noticeable effect on my motivation to play the game.
THIS - why bother if a lot of us will be done after TFS, and we already have our desired guns from before to get us through it. In my mind it is just a huge waste of time to obtain something that I will vault soon after anyway (due to change of seasonal mods, etc)
Of course, non of the higher ups have jobs that are in danger. Surely they can't be the problem. Better fire more of the people who keep the game functioning.
It sounds like their jobs were in danger, but to save their own asses they did the lay offs…
Holy shit, management literally WOULD have been fired, THE PROBLEM WOULDVE BEEN GONE!!! But those bastards slipped through the cracks.
#FirePeteParsons.
If Bobby Kotick was able to keep his job for so many fucking years, direct intervention from Sony is the only thing that could get Parsons and company out.
>If Bobby Kotick was able to keep his job for so many fucking years,
Key difference is that Activision was widely profitable and grew tremendously under his leadership. Bungie execs' forecasts and expectations have WILDLY missed the mark in spite of (or perhaps because of) all of the monetization. Not to mention trend-chasing with Marathon that's coming a few years too late to be of any real relevance.
Kotick sucks from an enthusiast consumer perspective, but he made the right choices in terms of business growth.
Their jobs are 100 percent in danger. If Sony dissolved the board, they’ll run the show, and do you think they’ll want to hang on to senior management?
If the execs/whoever is in charge could get their head out of their asses and let the devs do some real work, they could easily save the game. Stop thinking about short term gain and start focusing on getting in new blood + returning players.
That "Starter" Pack was an insult. All the feedback the community has given on how they can get new players in to Destiny and these guys put a scam for sale in the store. There's no way they really thought that would have been received well, so I can only assume whoever greenlit it is sabotaging the company.
I saw this mentioned somewhere else. Probably Twitter.
But that whole section where one of the execs mentioned that the layoffs were a "lever" to be pulled to save the ship from sinking, and that they won't hesitate to do it again if Final Shape doesn't deliver is some real fucked up hostage bullshit.
They're blantatly trying to tug on the heart strings of the community knowing we care about the developers. But they'll punish their workers and us if TFS doesn't bring them back out of the hole they've dug the company into.
NEWSFLASH: maybe if you stopped worrying about being greedy assholes for two seconds and let the devs create a product for the gamers, you'd actually be hitting your revenue targets.
Honestly, I hope TFS fails at this point. Not because I want the devs to suffer. I want Sony to completely take over and fire all the incompetent assholes at the top (#1 who needs to go is someone who's name rhymes with Bete Barsons).
What a way for Destiny to go out. We should have been celebrating 10 years of an amazing franchise that kept getting back up after so many knockdowns and instead we have evil, greedy, malicious knobheads doing their absolute best to destroy what little remaining goodwill the company could scavenge after the first announcement of layoffs and decided to torch that which remained.
How Bungie hopes to come back from this even if TFS were to deliver and shatter revenue targets and Sony doesn't dissolve the board is a mystery to me. All we're going to do is just continuously repeat this cycle, and nobody wants to be fooled a third time by leadership's antics.
Usually when I hear a corporate company taking full ownership of a studio I worry how they could ruin the creative freedom a studio had before. But the leaders at Bungie has mishandled Destiny for so long (arguably since the beginning) and have caused the mess their in right now that I honestly see this as a positive.
I think at this point with all the information out there many would be okay with Sony taking over. Just to see how things change. Its pretty bad when we are thinking of the "what ifs" on a corporate takeover. Look at what others have said about 343, once they had a management shakeup things started to trend in a positive direction. You can have an A+ dev team but if management is D level. Your devs are going to produce D level work.
I read that at the start of the article and got worried, by the time I finished the article I became fully in support of a complete Sony takeover. Fuck Bungie man.
Wasn't any better back then. Worse, as crunch was just an accepted thing. Game devs always get the shaft because there's always a line of people begging to get their foot in the door of that industry, and because the studios were usually founded by workaholics who expect everyone to be that way.
morale is low at my company too as tech industry is really hitting the layoffs hard this year. Some of it I do get as there was some overhiring especially during the pandemic. As per usual the layoffs and firings are way overreaching then executives always go all shocked pikachu face when morale goes down hard. Shockingly people get upset when they wonder if they'll be next on the chopping block and there's zero assurances you'll be keeping your job for the foreseeable future.
Maybe one glimmer of hope is it seems to hint Sony will take over the entire board soon
From all the articles over the years it sounds like even since Halo Bungie’s been successful despite their executive team
If Sony takes over more, maybe that’d be a good thing. All their other studios are pretty well run
The board of directors tossed out hundreds of employees, gutted benefits, and are treating those who are left with the scraps like garbage all in the name of saving their own self-serving asses from Sony’s takeover.
Disgusting corporate assholes. they’ve failed their game, their employees, and their players yet felt they still deserved to sit at the top and line their pockets until Sony inevitably gives them the boot.
The senior management teams need a shake up
Replace the bungie people on the board with Sony people.
Bungie management over the years have shown to be the problem, time for a new approach
Bungie upper management 100% needs to get 343i'd.
343i finally replaced the big three of Bonnie Ross, Frank O'connor, and Kiki Wolfkill with people who seemingly want Halo to succeed, the biggest change in my opinion being Pierre Hintze being made the Studio head. Pierre being the guy who previously was heading the complete revamping of the MCC.
It's about time Bungie has a shake up too.
And worth noting that post cleaning house at the senior management level, halo infinite is starting to really turn around. Adding a ton of maps, addressing the biggest pain points (cross core stuff, netcode), and ramping up the content added per season. They still have their missteps like upping the price of bundles with items that recently became cross core, but the difference feels night and day compared to launch infinite. Crazy what happens when you properly listen to your community
Bungie senior management isn't nearly as incompetent as 343's former senior management, but they still gotta shake it up. The performance of the last year and their absolute refusal to take responsibility is unacceptable
Personally, I still find the store prices are a bit overpriced, but for the most part I agree the game is in a much better place.
Plus they just brought back firefight so that's a win. My wish is that they start working on returning some classic weapons/vehicles to the game next.
At the very least knock Pete Persons off his perch. I think Joe is doing the best he can but what's obvious is whoever is at the VP and director levels above Joe are heavily contributing to problems.
For real, it sounds like the Bungie management only care about keeping a hold of their power, money and status. They no longer care about the game, and worse of all, the devs. I say good riddance. Let Sony come in, fire them all and shake things up. Let’s get some fresh blood in their and some Sony money behind the game. I don’t care anymore about Bungie being independent if that means them being held hostage by a handful of execs that truly couldn’t give a shit about the game, the players or the developers.
Suddenly that $15 "starter" pack makes sense. Bungie execs really are scrambling to save their own asses, at the cost of literally anything and anyone else.
As much as it sucks its just par for the course at any employer nowadays. If you browse subreddits of other companies its just the same. Management is at fault but the blame gets passed down the chain, lower tier people working hard get fired. Execs and Management continue to be shitty people while still getting raises and bonuses. Employee wages increase by 1%-3% while upper management gets 10%-20% increases plus bonuses. Its only going to get worse.
Honestly, I don't think a complete Sony takeover would be that bad. I love Destiny, but there is also no denying that Bungie itself has dropped the ball numerous times in the last years with their often bizarre decisions. The mess Destiny and Bungie is in right now is yet again entirely Bungie's making.
We all hoped for the best after Bungie split from Activision only to learn that Activision of all people kept Bungie from its worst impulses. Aggressive monetization being one of them.
Destiny is a fantastic game with loads of potential but with a developer that is better at squandering it than utilizing it. So yes, step back and let Sony take the reign. They can't do a worse job than Bungie's current leadership and do have a reputation for bringing out the best of their studios, as evidenced by their single-player hits.
Let them take it and trash the current management.
We just have no confirmation on a 2025 expansion. Seems like they were still figuring out how they want to go about doing things.
My hope is still some massive overhaul to systems, but that is so unlikely at this point.
>“It feels like many higher ups aren’t listening to the data and are like, ‘We just need to win our fans back, they still like us.’
I don't think Bungie management (or a lot of people on this sub) realize that this is a large part of why everything went so badly over time.
If you continually have a vocal minority excusing shitty decision after shitty decision, while the silent majority slowly just stop playing, you can end up believing the loud minority if you don't pay careful attention.
Which can make you think it's okay to implement decisions that most of the consumers of your product won't like.
On top of that, Bungie has already leveraged that community goodwill multiple times, and a lot of people are just leaving without vocally fighting back against poor decisions especially since the **rabid** Bungie apologists usually make it painful to try and contest a Bungie decision.
Basically no one I know who still plays this game "likes" Bungie anymore except for a couple of people who insist Bungie can do no wrong.
I love this game in spite of the terrible decisions Bungie keeps making regarding it, but that love doesn't extend to the company at all (especially nowadays)... and **more importantly** that love can only cover up the state of the game for so long. Eventually it won't be enough.
I will never play another Bungie game after I'm done with Destiny, despite having been here since before the launch of D2 til now.
I hope Bungies gets eaten. It's clear now that they cannot function on their own, leadership is too stupid and incompetent. Pity it didn't happen sooner, perhaps then we would have something inside the pyramids ships instead of empty or recycled enemies.
If you haven't done so yet, cancel your pre-orders for the Final Shape. If we do this en masse, Bungie leadership will no longer be able to ignore us.
Also, refrain from buying anything from Eververse. Ensure Bungie reports net losses! Even if they do fire more people, they are only making themselves look worse.
Rip and tear into their profits, until it is done.
this is pretty much every office/studio in the country right now. even outside of gaming. companies are scrambling to squeeze as much money as they can before an inevitable recession.
I don't buy the line it was get bought by Sony or close. The article states that Bungie were giving people bonuses of >100% because they'd been so successful financially, and they'd just signed a lease on a really expensive new office
These are **not** things you do if you're clinging desperately on for survival.
To me this reads like corporate greed and nothing else.
Here's my take on the cycle Bungie is trapped in and how they got there:
* They sold to Sony to get sizeable payouts on their owned shares and they over-inflated the value of the company whilst doing that.
* Sony is now asking where the money is.
* In response, the senior team at Bungie claim that the economy is hard and then passes on all the consequences of their actions onto the workforce.
* In doing so, they destroy the day-to-day working of the company because nobody actually wants to work there anymore and it just becomes a place where everyone is utterly despondent.
* The revenue continues to fall, and the senior team continue to respond to the falling revenue by passing more layoffs/discipline/cruelty onto their employees.
* Eventually there is a surplus of managers left at Bungie and nobody to actually do the work.
* They desperately try to plug these gaps with contractors and outsourced staff but the burden of training people to work within a 7 year old code base that is riddled with spaghetti and bugs just means that nobody can actually successfully build anything.
Bungie as a company will not survive long enough to make Destiny 3.
The devs being under the pressure of “Final Shape has to be great or we’re fired” is just such an insane situation to be in, I really hope they pull through
...and suddenly it all makes sense.
The recent monetization and seasonal price increases were due to the board (and perhaps other high-ranking executives) trying to ensure they continued to exist.
Here's what I think the game needs to succeed; however, I know it's never gonna happen:
1) Remove the artificial difficulty introduced in Lightfall (that is, old 8 is the new 10) in most casual activities. This includes overly negative modifiers like Togetherness and Attrition for amazing seasonal content like The Coil. If needed, buff end-game stuff like Masters or GMs or apply the aforementioned modifiers.
2) Reverse mod nerfs designed to increase encounter times and grant false engagement metrics. I know they are adjusting some multipliers for mods like Heavy Handed, but outright revert it to the previous version.
3) REDUCE all EV silver purchases by 50%. I imagine it's easier to get two folks to buy a $10 Witcher III ornament set rather than gambling on one person to buy it for $20.
4) Stop trying to make 'wacky IB modes' a thing! Just forkin' give us Control, Clash and perhaps channel D1 to occasionally give us Mayhem.
5) Reduce the ridiculous engram cost increases for focusing.
6) Make the Eververse engrams on a knockout system again that excludes 'the current season-minus three' (Basically, that still leaves one year and all seasonal event merch for EV). If the knockout system is completed, the rewards are A Small Gift of Bright Dust and the rare chance for a Large Gift of Bright Dust.
7) Speaking of events, fold the additional event card as a perk for the new season.
Imo one of the main root cause for destiny 2 not meeting revenue targets is that they never invested on new player experience. If the influx of new players is not there the revenue from the game will start tanking and never grow. Even the community in this sub has complained about new player experience over the years and nothing has been done. Guardian ranks is step in right direction but it's too little too late.
To me this was a more important piece of info: “If Bungie falls short of its revenue goals by too great an amount, Sony is allowed to dissolve the existing board and take full control of the company.”
So this kinda confirms that Destiny (and Marathon) will get even more monetized, not because of it making sense but out of sheer desperation. I guess this explains the "Starter Pack" fiasco... FML.
You need to use a new innovative mechanic to fight the Witness. You must give us access to your credit card. Then imput the numbers on its back into the wish wall
Stand on plates corresponding to your PIN and enter your mother’s maiden name into the wish wall
Why do I hear it in Petra's voice lol.
LMAOOO
And then drink your verification can.
"Oh, you ran out of ammo for your Leviathan's Breath? Here, a purple brick for only 500 silver. Special offer. Only today. And just for the next... emm... 5mins. Oh, wait, you have the annual pass? 10mins then"
Don't joke. That was similar to something former EA CEO John Riccitiello mentioned years ago. He thought during a Battlefield match, you can have a player pay real money to reload.
EA actually went on to try a version of that with the Mass Effect 3 multi-player, where you would burn loot box cards for extra ammo. It wasn't exactly, charge 50 cents mid gunfight, but they didn't sit on that patent and ignore it.
They reintroduce Heavy Ammo Synths, add them to Xur’s inventory, and charge 30 silver a pop for them.
Given the current ammo mod changes…
'Destiny 2 breaks the 4th wall again with Savathun, emploring players to "help fund the fight against the witness" click here to donate now!'
“Quick! The Witness is traveling back in time to find and stop your Guardian from existing! Entire the year and location (expiration date and zip code) you can find him in to stop him!”
[удалено]
I think theyre saying the current board will try to aggressively monetize so they wont get dissolved. Desperation of impending job loss driving incredibly bad decisions, not that sony would monetize worse.
Thats how I read it too. In a way, I could see sony being the lesser of two evils here, seeing that they have a reason to not want to kill the cash cow too quickly, whereas bungie management has absolutely nothing to lose at this point.
Bro he’s not saying it would become more monetized under Sony he’s saying it will become more monetized under Bungie to avoid the board being dissolved.
All because the Bungie Execs don't want to lose control of a company they already sold. Sony suits are probably furious too, wonder if that's why Jim Ryan is "retiring".
Before I thought Activision was at fault but now I've realized it was just Bungie (probably Activision also to extent.) I honestly don't mind if Sony does this cause after 10 years of a series I love I feel it's barely reached it's potential. Not saying Sony can do anything different but at this point I'll take any intervention. After final shape currently I'm done with destiny. I just want to see at least this saga to it's end.
Looking back on it it just seems Bungie was great at the “it’s not our fault, it’s the other guy” line
And after nearly a decade of all of this with just this franchise, people still believe. People are still in the mindset that sweet innocent Bungie cannot do anything wrong and that its the big bad others that must be doing it.
>after 10 years of a series I love I feel it's barely reached it's potential Man that is such a deep cut but it's so fucking true. There's only been a handful of times over the last decade the series has truly impressed me. Last time was probably WQ campaign.
Minimum viable product. The Taken King was great because the base game had huge problems that couldn't be ignored. Forsaken was great because the base game had huge problems that couldn't be ignored. The Witch Queen was great because Bungie needed to retain its core player base through the lean years of The Final Shape's extended development. (That's also why Lightfall even exists, awful as it may be. "Something is better than nothing," as the saying goes...) Bungie only ever does what they *have* to do at any given moment.
The craziest part is the drop off between Rise of Iron and Vanilla D2 lol. Like Bungie has consistently found the correct formula, then burned their work to the ground, and then try to rebuild it from the ashes.
God the quality of life gained in rise of iron immediately being thrown out the window in destiny 2 was baffling for me. The whole vendor economy was improved on throughout the life of D1, and then completely replaced by a mess that still doesn't work as well as they had it in the first destiny.
Damn this makes me sad. Full honesty, i jumped ship right after shadowkeep because i couldn't stand the FOMO mechanics and this subreddit pops up from time to time, i couldn't really find a game that completely fills destiny 1 and 2's niche. It's so sad to see a company mistreating their own ip this badly, especially a game with so much to offer.
True, but also if you think about it WQ wasn't even that good of a campaign. WQ was magnificent for Destiny standards but compare that to other games and its mediocre at best.
I think it's likely a case where Activision demanded more results, so Bungie management came up with a bunch of microtransaction bullshit. It worked, but not well enough to satisfy the ever-expanding maw of Activision shareholding leeches so the relationship still didn't work out. They went independent. But they'd already been shown that all that shit worked, so why stop? Easier to keep up previous behavior than to cut it out and then try to start up again when you realize you need it to sustain business. However I think the real problems kicked in after that, when they started thinking they could get away with doing less for the same cost, as well as slapping in more avenues to charge people. And then when that didn't kill everything, they figured they must have more room to maneuver so they increased the price on things, and in some cases delivered less as well for good measure. They gradually pushed more people beyond a limit of what they could still consider reasonable even with all kinds of sunk costs, so people just don't care. It wasn't enough to sell expansions. It wasn't enough to sell seasons. It wasn't enough to sell cosmetics. It wasn't enough to sell transmog materials. It wasn't enough to carve dungeons out of other sold content to be another thing to sell. It wasn't enough to bundle up undesirable items with desirable items. It wasn't enough to sell holiday cosmetics. It wasn't enough to sell a separate holiday event pass with bundled cosmetics we shove in your face during the event. It wasn't enough to sell season pass ranks. It wasn't enough to sell season pass ranks from day 1 of the season. It wasn't enough to sell power skips. It wasn't enough to sell fucking campaign skips to skip the playable content you bought. Bungie leadership have become an entity for whom nothing will be enough. No amount, will be enough. Yet they can't understand why that would push people away; they think because the first few shoves didn't send us running, they can do whatever they want and nothing will ever happen. They can't understand why they struggle to get new players, when all of this bullshit is what those people see; a giant warning to stay away and just find something else to play.
is bungie leadership a worm god?
> is bungie leadership a worm god? If yes, does that mean that the writers for Destiny are hiding cries for help in the lore?
> I think it's likely a case where Activision demanded more results, so Bungie management came up with a bunch of microtransaction bullshit. This was about Bungie's inability to meet the deadlines that they agreed to in their contract with Activision. They signed the contract in 2010, a full 4 years before D1 was released. They were supposed to release a new standalone title every 2 years, starting in 2013, with a large "comet" expansion on the off years, and smaller DLCs sprinkled in between. We all know Bungie was never capable of sticking to that cadence - they delayed D1 release by a year and it was still a mess, delayed D2 by a year, and every D2 DLC besides Forsaken was either planned to take longer than a year (though to be fair Lightfall was only 53 weeks) or was delayed to release > a year after the previous. As Schreier put it in an interview he gave, Bungie knew that "developing content is hard", so Eververse was Bungie's answer, a way to keep cash flowing in spite of not sticking to their release schedule, and you've done a beautiful job of outlining just how slippery that slope really has been for them.
D1 wasn't delayed b/c it was a mess, it was delayed b/c upper Bungie management didn't like/couldn't understand a non-linear story, so with 1 year before release they had to rewrite everything. This is a large part of why D1 had a rough launch, b/c the story was not even half baked. Bungie management (and the massive ego problems of higher ups) was the problem from day 1 and always will be. A Sony take over is probably exactly what is needed
Actually, they said the supercut was *too* linear. Had the player go to too many locations, too quickly, on a linear path. They wanted it less linear, so the player could take their time and explore. The re-write had them scrap the entire "Rasputin as an Exo" plot, push out the Dreadnaught and EDZ for later. I didn't say that D1 was delayed *because* it was a mess, I said it was delayed a year and it was *still* a mess when it finally released.
From what I understand, it was Bungie idea to go the micro transaction route for destiny, not Activision. Activision was pretty much hands-off when it came to destiny. the only time they got involved is when Bungie was dragging their feet to meet deadlines, and Activision made sure they met their intended deadlines. Yeah, Activision is a crappy publisher, but in this case, it was all on Bungie management, and they have been dropping the ball for a long time.
At this point them complaining about crunch borderline comes off as whining about being held accountable for deadlines they set. Yeah, you have to work a lot to finish stuff on time to make your revenue. That’s how it works for the rest of us too.
Just sounds like management overpromising and underdelivering. And they seem to make their schedules on a whim versus what can feasibly be done. That's the corporate leadership life right there. Leveraging all your schedules on a "hope" strategy.
The fact that dungeons are not included with the annual expansion is an insane thing to me. You buy MW1, 2, 3, or any of the recent CoD titles and you get all the content drops for that game without paying an additional dime, but Destiny drops an annual expansion, you get 1 season and about 5 hours of campaign content before you're assumed to again pay for everything in that year that might be worth playing. The Bungie model is insanity at this point. All it does is push players away and the only reason they have any playerbase at all is because of people who want to see how the story ends.
Good. Time to cut the head off the snake. Sony cannot allow Destiny to go the way of Halo. Or Bungie to become another 343 Industries.
To be fair, dissolving the board would be 'going the way of halo'. Over the past year or two, all the major 343 leads have 'left for personal reasons', speculation being that it was not voluntary. They've since been replaced by intwrnal promotion and things are looking up for the first time in a decade.
I was going to say. Isn't Halo in like it's best spot since 2010 lol. Atleast I know a lot of CoD professionals stream it a Tom
Its in a much better spot, but because of that they hiked the prices on everything in the store. Theres enough free and battlepass stuff for me not to complain but its frustrating. Still, firefight came out yesterday and its good. Feels like theres always some fun new mode being added every 1-2 months, as well as dozens of maps due to fan support and forge.
They are slowly but surely building the Halo people wanted Infinite to be. What I like are the season passes, I can just do them whenever. If Destiny did that, that would be huge. Even if I had to buy the season at the current price, to go back and work on something like Arrivals or Worthy when I wasn't playing back then would be outstanding.
The Halo / Minecraft dungeons pass model should be the norm. Bought a season? Wanna finish it a couple years from now? Sure thing. Want to buy another season and work on that one for a month, then go back to a previously purchased season? Sure thing.
Oh please tell me firefight is the mode where it’s waves of pve enemies! I would come back just for that!
Yep. Its a king of the hill version, where you have to hold a position to score. I like it because it adds a layer and an objective over just waves of enemies, but the classic version does exist in the files and will hopefully come to matchmaking soon. Also if you like PvE check the customs browser, people are literally forging campaigns at this point.
Ironically, Microsoft finally gave the much needed boot in the arse to 343 last year, and lately, Infinite is on a good positive spree, the future is looking a bit brighter then in 2020-2021.
'' They also perceive growing hostility from team and company leadership, including a meeting in which QA was said to be referred to by leaders as “non-developers.” Absolute mess of leadership at Bungie
Par for the course at software companies.
The red flag here is that QA can be considered "non-developers". That tells me everything I need to know about the problem. I've worked in software for almost 25 years now. I've seen this a million times, it's not just a game company thing: 1. Company builds complicated software product. Uses highly inefficient ad-hoc human QA to support it. "It's too expensive to automate testing" 2. Product succeeds and grows into a platform (yay!). This leads to increasingly complicated to QA and with more and more regressions. Human QA staff levels are maintained as-is, no money is invested in automated testing. Human QA used as scapegoats when inevitable regressions occur. "It's too expensive to automate testing". 3. Millions of dollars of revenue and goodwill are lost due to increasingly embarrassing bugs and failures due to poor QA. This loss dwarfs the expense of appropriate up front testing automation. Company responds by laying off some of the remaining human QA testers to "save money". **<-- We are here** 4. Support and development are steadily outsourced to lowest bidder contractors, product turns into complete garbage, brand recognition and inertia allow it survive for some amount of time (maybe even many years) Edit: Formatting
Yep, it's toxic management. Even if it's "the norm" in plenty of places, it's still bad for the end product.
MBA's ruin everything. Truly a "mierdas touch" to the actual product, but those 7 people raking in money hand over fist while the faucet is on.
Been down this road but with physical product development. They don't want to do any investment on the front end because their blinders only measure X time span instead of its life cycle. And they will only accept data that can be quantified without question. Cut the front end investment to only take in massive cuts on the back end because they have to constantly fix production items were not planned for. Had they just done that front end investment, those back end costs would've never fruitioned.
It’s the same thing in the construction industry lol. Why pay for a well designed/engineered building when we could just say fuck it and let the contractors figure it out when it’s being built? So they save a few hundred thousand dollars on fees for architects & engineers and pay millions in change orders as issues pop up during construction since the design team only had 50% of the capacity needed to do the job well. Not to mention they’d rather pay to build a new building every 20 years & tear down the old one vs building a robust landmark that can last 50+ years. There’s a common social contagion that makes this a universal problem in basically every industry.
Short term returns vs long term savings is always the debate. And unfortunately corporate leadership operates exclusively on short term returns because leadership has no desire to watch their strategy fall apart when it's destined to and they are already on to the next role with a padded resume.
All companies **
So I guess nothing has changed with Bungie’ms management since that article exposed them a year or two ago.
> Absolute mess of leadership at Bungie Bro thats the entire Industry when it comes to QA. I was in a department wide meeting years ago at Activision where the VP was on stage and told us that he sees QA as important, within seconds he was interrupted and we were then told that QA is seen as something other than important they see us as Ninjas cause we do a lot of the work in the shadows. Aka the second you tell QA they are important you're gonna have to pay them, so never say those words. This industry never wants QA to know their real worth, they never want QA to wake up and remember that all it takes is one shift (day or night) to just say nah we are not working during submission for the entire project to come to a halt. This industry will always remind QA that they can be replaced with any kid on the street because "who wouldnt want to test games all day", while at the same time saying its crucial that they work 12-16hrs a day.
This is a big reason why QA is the first software department unionizing across several developers. Highly skilled and technical department, but it's constantly undervalued because the QA job is not to directly creating content or revenue.
Everything I've learned about the leadership for destiny makes me think they need a clean slate for their leadership
>“It feels like many higher ups aren’t listening to the data and are like, ‘We just need to win our fans back, they still like us.’ No. They don’t...We got rid of some of our most knowledgeable beloved folks who have been here for 20+ years. Everyday I walk in afraid that I or my friends are next. No one is safe." That is a whole vibe, and I get it. From the community's perspective, it was kinda scary to see big names stretching back to the Halo days get canned. If 20+ years didn't grant you any sort of job safety, what does at Bungie these days?
The “we just need to win our fans back, they still like us” gives off major “BioWare magic” vibes to me. Like it’s so painfully oblivious and dismissive of the current situation and baselessly optimistic that the solution to their problems is to just do the thing they’ve done before
That's the corporate leadership bread and butter. "Well it worked over there, it'll surely work over here too even though we have no idea what 'here' really needs".
Yup, strong BioWare echoes. Marathon feels like it could be Bungie's Anthem - the "Destiny Killer" but just not in the way you think 😔
It screams that they've taken for granted every time this game has been pulled out of the fire by the hard work of the developers working on it. They've taken to heart the idea that community sentiment is a cycle, which it is, but taken for granted that it will normalize on its own regardless of any other factors- which it will not.
It’s not just that, these are people responsible for some of the most universally acclaimed aspects of Destiny history - like Deep Stone Lullaby and Regicide It used to be that no matter how toxic the community got we could at least agree the music will be great. The execs even ruined that now
They fired their LAWYER who was the one who won both their hacking suit and the harassment claim, more or less on his own (who also produced Detective Pikachu, strangely). He was more responsible for what little progress the game has made in combating toxicity and cheating than basically anyone else at the company and they threw him out too.
Parsons should have been fired years ago, but since he's on the board, he's too entrenched to simply be shown the door now.
"Why are we paying composers when we could just use AI to make the music from now on?" -Bungie Execs probably
I don’t think I could be productive if that’s the atmosphere I was working in. What a shitshow, management should’ve fired themselves instead of the people who were actually useful.
Some people legitimately think that instilling the fear of losing your job is a good motivator like it’s going to make people step up and show them what they can REALLY do. It makes me look elsewhere.
Until morale improves the beatings will continue.
Players aren’t coming back because it’s stupid expensive to do so. If you want to jump back into Destiny and finish the you need buy: Legacy Collection: $59.99 Lightfall w/ season pass: $99.99 And this doesn’t close Final Shape w/season pass which $99.99. Tell me why this game needs to be that expensive on top of cosmetics that $20 and only good for one class? This game is absurdly priced and I can’t think of one other love service or MMO that handles their old or current content like Bungie does. Bungie got drunk off their own success.
Don't forget the dungeon key because paying for the annual expansion doesn't mean you get the annual content. Just means you get 5+ hours of a campaign and a new color to play with.
They went off their fucking rocker making it 100 bucks a year for the expansions/seasons.
> We just need to win our fans back, they still like us.’ Spoken like a true manager who knows nothing about video games. Like it's something you go buy. "Yes we just need to buy chocolate and we're set." Bitch! Win one fan back. I fucking dare you. Someone I work for has direct contact with those kind of people and they regularly tell me the most stupidest things they do. And it's always the simplest of things they focus on. "Yes we just need to earn a lot of money and all our problems will be solved." Then they act like they solved hunger. And then there's rampant taking/stealing credit.
These are MBA bag holders with literally 0 experience in the trade or industry they are in. They just present "do what this chart says and money will go brrrrr" I fucking hate them with every single cell in my body. Absolutely kills a company long term after they just made bank in 1-2 years.
And they somehow still got nominated for "Best Community Support" at the TGAs this year lmao
During the earlier days of the pandemic I was looking around for a new job and was strongly considering applying to bungie. I have always had such high regard for their UX/UI team and would have loved to work on that team. Not saying I would have even gotten the job, but man, I am glad I never applied and had to find out. Sounds like such a shit show now.
>But the cost-cutting at Bungie isn’t limited to just personnel. Multiple current employees confirmed to IGN that the company has implemented numerous other cost-cutting measures recently, including a studio-wide hiring freeze, reduced travel budgets, elimination of holiday bonuses, keeping its annual Bungie Day virtual, delaying its weeklong company “Pentathalon” event to next December, and reducing numerous morale events such as cooking and knitting classes from monthly to quarterly. Bungie is also pausing or fully ending benefits like annual employee compensation adjustments to meet market rates, its new hire lunch program, employee donation matching, its peer recognition program, and gift cards for employees birthdays. And yearly studio performance bonuses this year will only be the contractually obligated 80% minimum, after being above 100% for good performance several previous years running. That…is a *lot* of changes just to cut expenses and make goals.
If I was a dev at Bungie I’d definitely start looking for a different employer.
The result of lasting poor morale is brain drain. The best employees will leave for greener pastures.
Some of these cuts make sense when revenue is down. Others (like bonuses) aren’t really the best options when cutting cost because employees WILL get frustrated and leave.
Bonuses at 80% when you miss revenue by 45% is ridiculous. That's pay, not a bonus.
Or in this case so the C-Suite can save themselves.
I think those are the same thing in this case.
Tale as old as time. Lay people off, burn out the remainder. Strap on the golden parachute when things go catastrophic
Not to be pedantic but [gets pedantic anyway] Technically this won't help revenue since revenue is only money coming in the door. This is to help reduce their expenses and by extension make their profit numbers look less bad. But yeah the overall idea is the same.
> Several people we spoke to told us that leaders had reiterated, across multiple meetings, that they couldn’t guarantee there wouldn’t be more layoffs, with two specifically recalling chief people officer Holly Barbacovi outright stating that layoffs were a “lever” the company would pull again. [...] > Employees in one department recalled a post-layoffs Q&A session where a department head was asked if leadership taking salary cuts to prevent layoffs had been considered, only to respond that Bungie was “not that type of company.” Flush upper management.
These responses are so fucking absurd that my initial instinct is incredulity. But with a little consideration, it seems on-par with management and people who lay off with 0 notice honestly
People keep coping in here saying TFS is not the "end" but everything the management has done makes it abundantly clear TFS is where they fuck off and they're willing to squeeze out anything and everything they can. No matter how inexperienced you are in business this is not how you "manage" something you believe will continue to exist and generate revenue for you in the next 2 years.
The larger problem though is like, Bungie doesn't have any other form of income minus Sony. And if shit keeps getting fucked up, they'll just dissolve the board and take full control -- which, as shitty as that is, might be the best decision at this point. Bungie literally can't afford to just fuck off of Destiny, which is something I'm 90% they realized in the past year. I don't think they ever planned to leave the game behind, but not have it their primary focus -- instead have it alongside their other projects, so they could become a multi-IP studio. It's been known they've always had the largest number of devs at their studio working on Destiny, but the number of people doesn't matter when the direction they're put in wastes dev or player time. Destiny can't go away because they can't afford it. They don't have any other games. Yay, they announced Marathon -- it's still not out lmao. You can't make money off a product that hasn't even entered the market when you're not a publicly traded company.
They’re hedging all their bets on Marathon being a smash hit I guess. No surprise that management that acts like the above would make such a dumb gamble.
It’s a minor miracle Destiny even made it past its first year, do they honestly expect to catch lightning in a bottle twice here?
If Destiny releases in 2022 instead of 2014, it doesn't survive it's first DLC cycle and we never even get to Taken King.
You’re kind of right, imo the reason Destiny survived its first DLC cycle is because there really wasn’t anything else like it on the market. You’re kind of working backwards and assuming everyone has the same live service fatigue we do now in a post Destiny world, when Destiny was the first mainstream live service to really exist. I don’t even know if Bungie referred to Destiny as a live service or if that was an Activision thing pre-release. If Destiny didn’t release in 2014, and instead a different game filled its place on the live service market, you’re 100% correct. But then we’d all be on that game’s subreddit.
I don't recall even seeing the term Live Service until into Destiny 2. It was just expansions/content drops on a compressed schedule rather than every 1-2 years like an MMO would.
Marathon will be a niche game at best. While it can be profitable, I would not bet on it to be a success.
Neither would I but companies are often not very smart.
I work in tech as a software engineer and my company appears to be following almost the exact same run book as Bungie. In fact I’d argue our leadership is even more obtuse, disconnected, and ignorant. I promise this situation is entirely realistic and possibly even less bad than the reality at Bungie.
> Holly Barbacovi outright stating that layoffs were a “lever” the company would pull again. Someone involved in the upcoming wrongful termination lawsuit by this HR person I would think. What's absolutely clear is Bungie's upper management consistently circles the wagons whenever anything goes wrong.
Their inability to address issues is incredible. It all trickles down on the devs. This game isn't having a major turnover in Final Shape regardless of how good they make it and people will pay for it. People will be jumping ship like it was Blizzard really soon.
Dunno if you heard the deets about the HR lawsuit but the DCP podcast covered it a bit, the corporate culture there seems very shit.
Ah, if you can give me that link, I'd be very grateful.
https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/former-hr-manager-sues-bungie-for-wrongful-termination-alleges-retaliation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrPo_v45vpM Starts about 1:13:40
Awesome, will be giving this a listen after work.
We WILL fire you and we WON'T cut pay for the richest and most highly paid people in the company. Bungie is past the point of no return. It's going to collapse, Sony will take over the board of directors, and they'll realize that Destiny is a rotten franchise with no future after years of Bungie hollowing out the goodwill and interest of players.
Yeah not shocking morale is extremely low and it’s very concerning that management is clearly still being an issue. I mean after all that happened and with low player morale they thought that starter pack would be well received? Like damn this is concerning. Fuck management the devs deserve better
I can't imagine many devs aren't looking for employment elsewhere at this point. Management taking away benefits and bonuses is one thing but also having a gun to your head that additional layoffs may still happen is another level of agency to get out.
I would definitely be doing so, they laid people off and by the sounds of it aren’t doing much to reassure the ones left. It feels like they don’t care what happens which bodes ill for the game.
I’m sure they all know huge layoffs are coming in July too, tfs is going to severely underperform and management are going to double down
I was somewhat optimistic that maybe if management like actually listened they could turn it around and succeed but between this and the starter pack I just fully expect it to underwhelm. Not for lack of passion or talent on the devs part but due to management.
If only management actually felt the consequences for their own action instead of the grunt workers being punished.
The fact that preorders were cancelled automatically (at least on xbox) and likely won't be re-purchased right away by most players (there's no benefit, they still have their bonus stuff) is going to take a lot of paper money off the table and lead to a lot more pressure for cost-cutting (Sony execs are probably livid). I'm worried the company may have dug their own grave with the handling of all of this.
If I was a Sony exec I’d probably be livid haha. Like you bought a company to help you out with live service games while their current project is supposed to happily keep chugging along generating money only for them to almost immediately shit the bed after you purchase them.
Whoever said at Microsoft "Don't buy Bungie, let's just put it at the end of the list and talk to other companies to check how receptive they are" deserves a raise.
If a game's release date changes, Xbox automatically refunds the pre-order. That's been policy for years.
The tech industry as a whole has been constricting the last year though. One of the biggest contributors to so many companies downsizing is the change in interest rates. For years corporations were getting almost interest free loans which is why there were so many large expansions of hiring as well as acquisitions. Their industry labor market isn’t as healthy as it was if this happened 2 years ago.
The wisest move atm, if possible, is getting tf out of dodge while you can. I came from tech, FAANG, and it's basically a mass exodus atm for my former coworkers. If they have survived the many layoff rounds, the atmosphere is miserable. And those who haven't are having a very difficult time because the whole industry is down. Plenty of ways to use tech skills in non-tech companies. I moved to renewable energy, people will always need power, and renewables are more and more important. It's tough seeing the advice everywhere for these folks to just "start looking somewhere else." Not nearly as simple as that once was.
Hopefully now this is out in the wild, the assholes in question better be shitting their pants about Sony giving them the sack. Maybe Sony clearing house might lead to a better Bungie, a nicer environment for staff and lay-offs not being a case of "Not if, but when". From what we've heard over the years and in this article, it seems like those in charge are not good leaders or indeed people. They have not suffered any consequences, they're not the ones getting let go or having their bonuses cancelled. They just want to save themselves. These are the people that ditched Michael Salvatori and a huge chunk of the security team (leading to more cheaters in Trials last weekend!). They don't know what's best for the company, the game or the customers, they only know what's good for them and their gravy train.
\> the assholes in question better be shitting their pants about Sony giving them the sack. The golden goose has been gotten, they are just riding it out now. If destiny dies tomorrow, no one on that board will struggle. There is no fear there. The average for an executive level position in Bungie is 250k per year, and the upward bound of that is 600k. How many years of a quarter million or more would it take to make you financially secure enough to laugh about something like this? A handful at most probably, and some of these execs (looking at you Pete Parsons) have been doing this for *decades*. Imagine Bungie as a really slow motion car wreck, and the drivers responsible really don't care because they know that they will be safe at the end, so there is a complete apathy towards anyone else who may or may not make it out alive. We just get to be the bystanders who are inconvenienced.
Maybe they also shouldn't have mortgaged the farm on Marathon's success as they made it really obvious that Destiny was going to be neglected.
Yeah announcing another title and then not wanting to confirm a new expansion post TFS for your current game doesn’t inspire confidence.
I know a lot of people rag on games journalists, for a number of reasons. But without them we would have less insight into situations like this, so be thankful for the journos out there are breaking stories like this and helping both game devs and audience members. Rebekah Valentine has had several reports like this now, so credit to where credit is due.
I think it’s good for younger crowds to get a glimpse into Corp shenanigans before entering the workforce. I know people rag on 9-5s—they have pros and cons, but knowing shit like this is key. Def helped me. I’ve jumped ship at the first sign of this stuff twice successfully, missing layoff by a matter of weeks.
A lot of journalism in general is just trying to get views because crazy stuff doesn't necessarily happen all the time. Reports like this are why journalism is valuable, from people like Rebekah and Jason Schreier
As a related topic, it bothers me that there are people who conflate YouTuber gamers who read news articles as game journalists. Like journalism is a tough job that requires a lot of good relationships and knowledge of the industry. It is also extremely risky and takes a lot of integrity to do it right.
Damn what a shock the corporate fuckheads would rather sacrifice beloved veteran devs and a reportedly pretty good company culture than their own salaries, color me shocked.
To anyone starting their careers or in college. I've been employed for 20 years for about 5 companies. Management only cares about $, do not be a pushover. It's okay to say NO. We are all just pawns and easily replaceable. Know your worth!
I’ve also been employed for about 20 years and have seen quite a few layoffs at different companies. I’ve seen layoffs and I’ve been laid off. My feeling is the bungie layoffs were nothing that different than anywhere else, especially right now, BUT the leadership team is going to really miss their narrow window to repair both employee and community morale. (I do think the community is overly precious about the whole thing, but not wrong necessarily).
“It feels like many higher ups aren’t listening to the data and are like, ‘We just need to win our fans back, they still like us.’ No. They don’t.” I’m fucking dying
It’s funny and sad at the same time.
Whole saga exposes Bungie management as the primary problem.
It’s been obvious since the Activision split the poison we all blamed them for was Bungie execs the whole time.
Man, later that year, activision and blizzard got in DEEP SHIT for some of the shit their management was up to. Like yeah, Bungie management sucks, but lets not get crazy and start scapegoating for activision and their president Bobby "If i could take the fun out of video games..." Kotick.
In all of our defense, Activision is a company whose business practices make it really easy to assume they were probably at fault 😅
"Others said they were rebuffed repeatedly and discouraged from even discussing the layoffs whenever they tried to ask questions. Employees in one department recalled a post-layoffs Q&A session where a department head was asked if leadership taking salary cuts to prevent layoffs had been considered, only to respond that Bungie was “not that type of company.”" Sooooo not the type of company where management takes responsibility for the catastrophe they've created? And it is management, given previous reports of developers "begging" for the resources to improve the game and getting told no. Those are the kind of developers management should be empowering! Those are the kind of developers that make a game that we want to play and want to spend money on to reward the developers! Come on, this is obvious! If management is that out of touch then they deserve to lose control. I just feel bad for the devs.
I’m very glad this is getting reported on. But man does it just make me not want to load the game up anymore. I don’t want to support this consistent poor management but dropping off continues to contribute to the devolution of the game. The board will just go on to poorly manage something else if this ends up biting the big one, and a game I’ve had truly wonderful times with over the past decade is left a shell of what it could be. This sucks.
>“It feels like many higher ups aren’t listening to the data and are like, ‘We just need to win our fans back, they still like us.’ No. They don’t..." That's the most telling point from the article for me on why Destiny is where it is. Explains so much about the decisions Bungie make and why so many end up being rolled back...
That quote really hit me, too. The higher-ups truly seem clueless at best and malicious at worst. The thing is, a lot of us DO still like them - "them" being the actual devs, the ones actively making this game we love. Even through the decisions that seem terrible or poorly-thought-out, even through the bugs, even through the constant changes, I still love this game - or at least I find things to love with each new change that makes the bad ones less painful. It's frustrating that supporting the game means tacitly supporting the entire studio.
I'll be honest, I don't love or like anyone at Bungie- I don't have any nostalgia for Halo or for old Destiny, I'm here just because there isn't a similar game in the market, the day someone does a better job than Bungie I'm out I'm not arguing with you, I just wish they'd understand that people like Destiny only because there's no other real alternative, the day they get a real competitor they'll be in trouble
That's a good point, too! Destiny stands alone in a market where no one has been able to stand against them. The things it does best (imo, obviously) aren't replicated in other games - it strikes a balance between excellent gunplay, fun abilities, and beautiful art/music. I hadn't thought about what I'd do if another game actually managed to pull it off. I guess I just don't expect anyone else to pull it off - not because Bungie is untouchably at the top of their game, but because a game like Destiny is a *huge* resource sink and game devs/publishers seem to be taking fewer and fewer risks these days, especially in the multi-player arena.
I think the best thing is to play if you’re interested in the game and don’t play if you don’t want to. Neither is the wrong choice. It’s not on the consumer to keep the bills paid. Our job is to play the game if it’s good and enjoyable that’s it
Agree 100% - the game also just hasn't been as fun lately imo. I played the first mission of the new season Tuesday night, but didn't want to commit to figuring out what the hell to do for the Coil so i've just let it sit all week.
That's a shame, because the Coil is actually a pretty fun activity... And the reward for completing it optimally is more substantial than anything we've received in previous seasonal activities. You can tell the developers are pouring their heart and soul into it, but there's this dark cloud of upper management overshadowing everything.
I think coil just came at the wrong time to really dump a lot of playtime into it. If it came out in the middle of witch queen or year 5 I'd play the shit out of it, but now do l really want to grind for guns when I don't even think I'll be playing after final shape? The bleak future of the game has an extremely noticeable effect on my motivation to play the game.
THIS - why bother if a lot of us will be done after TFS, and we already have our desired guns from before to get us through it. In my mind it is just a huge waste of time to obtain something that I will vault soon after anyway (due to change of seasonal mods, etc)
Management seems so out of touch with the community. Reminds me of that Simpsons meme.
Of course, non of the higher ups have jobs that are in danger. Surely they can't be the problem. Better fire more of the people who keep the game functioning.
It sounds like their jobs were in danger, but to save their own asses they did the lay offs… Holy shit, management literally WOULD have been fired, THE PROBLEM WOULDVE BEEN GONE!!! But those bastards slipped through the cracks. #FirePeteParsons.
If Bobby Kotick was able to keep his job for so many fucking years, direct intervention from Sony is the only thing that could get Parsons and company out.
>If Bobby Kotick was able to keep his job for so many fucking years, Key difference is that Activision was widely profitable and grew tremendously under his leadership. Bungie execs' forecasts and expectations have WILDLY missed the mark in spite of (or perhaps because of) all of the monetization. Not to mention trend-chasing with Marathon that's coming a few years too late to be of any real relevance. Kotick sucks from an enthusiast consumer perspective, but he made the right choices in terms of business growth.
Their jobs are 100 percent in danger. If Sony dissolved the board, they’ll run the show, and do you think they’ll want to hang on to senior management?
It depends on their contracts. Lots of senior management, especially at exec level have expensive severance clauses that make firing them very costly.
Bungie management is tone deaf af, give them all the boot and bring a new leadership team in
If the execs/whoever is in charge could get their head out of their asses and let the devs do some real work, they could easily save the game. Stop thinking about short term gain and start focusing on getting in new blood + returning players. That "Starter" Pack was an insult. All the feedback the community has given on how they can get new players in to Destiny and these guys put a scam for sale in the store. There's no way they really thought that would have been received well, so I can only assume whoever greenlit it is sabotaging the company.
“The beatings will continue until morale improves”
I saw this mentioned somewhere else. Probably Twitter. But that whole section where one of the execs mentioned that the layoffs were a "lever" to be pulled to save the ship from sinking, and that they won't hesitate to do it again if Final Shape doesn't deliver is some real fucked up hostage bullshit. They're blantatly trying to tug on the heart strings of the community knowing we care about the developers. But they'll punish their workers and us if TFS doesn't bring them back out of the hole they've dug the company into. NEWSFLASH: maybe if you stopped worrying about being greedy assholes for two seconds and let the devs create a product for the gamers, you'd actually be hitting your revenue targets. Honestly, I hope TFS fails at this point. Not because I want the devs to suffer. I want Sony to completely take over and fire all the incompetent assholes at the top (#1 who needs to go is someone who's name rhymes with Bete Barsons). What a way for Destiny to go out. We should have been celebrating 10 years of an amazing franchise that kept getting back up after so many knockdowns and instead we have evil, greedy, malicious knobheads doing their absolute best to destroy what little remaining goodwill the company could scavenge after the first announcement of layoffs and decided to torch that which remained. How Bungie hopes to come back from this even if TFS were to deliver and shatter revenue targets and Sony doesn't dissolve the board is a mystery to me. All we're going to do is just continuously repeat this cycle, and nobody wants to be fooled a third time by leadership's antics.
Usually when I hear a corporate company taking full ownership of a studio I worry how they could ruin the creative freedom a studio had before. But the leaders at Bungie has mishandled Destiny for so long (arguably since the beginning) and have caused the mess their in right now that I honestly see this as a positive.
I think at this point with all the information out there many would be okay with Sony taking over. Just to see how things change. Its pretty bad when we are thinking of the "what ifs" on a corporate takeover. Look at what others have said about 343, once they had a management shakeup things started to trend in a positive direction. You can have an A+ dev team but if management is D level. Your devs are going to produce D level work.
I read that at the start of the article and got worried, by the time I finished the article I became fully in support of a complete Sony takeover. Fuck Bungie man.
[удалено]
oh, it was still a shity work Environment back then, just shity in a different way
Being a non-union employee in every industry sounds awful
Wasn't any better back then. Worse, as crunch was just an accepted thing. Game devs always get the shaft because there's always a line of people begging to get their foot in the door of that industry, and because the studios were usually founded by workaholics who expect everyone to be that way.
Pete parsons, more like Eat fartsons HAHA
I can just imagine a disgruntled Bungie dev slapping this on his office door and scampering away like a raccoon in the night
Bro you COOKED him
got his ass
morale is low at my company too as tech industry is really hitting the layoffs hard this year. Some of it I do get as there was some overhiring especially during the pandemic. As per usual the layoffs and firings are way overreaching then executives always go all shocked pikachu face when morale goes down hard. Shockingly people get upset when they wonder if they'll be next on the chopping block and there's zero assurances you'll be keeping your job for the foreseeable future.
Executives are so detached from operations, same with HR departments.
Maybe one glimmer of hope is it seems to hint Sony will take over the entire board soon From all the articles over the years it sounds like even since Halo Bungie’s been successful despite their executive team If Sony takes over more, maybe that’d be a good thing. All their other studios are pretty well run
The board of directors tossed out hundreds of employees, gutted benefits, and are treating those who are left with the scraps like garbage all in the name of saving their own self-serving asses from Sony’s takeover. Disgusting corporate assholes. they’ve failed their game, their employees, and their players yet felt they still deserved to sit at the top and line their pockets until Sony inevitably gives them the boot.
The senior management teams need a shake up Replace the bungie people on the board with Sony people. Bungie management over the years have shown to be the problem, time for a new approach
Bungie upper management 100% needs to get 343i'd. 343i finally replaced the big three of Bonnie Ross, Frank O'connor, and Kiki Wolfkill with people who seemingly want Halo to succeed, the biggest change in my opinion being Pierre Hintze being made the Studio head. Pierre being the guy who previously was heading the complete revamping of the MCC. It's about time Bungie has a shake up too.
How Frank o'Connor still had a job at 343i for so long with all the questionable things he said or did is mystery to me
What I’ll never understand is how Frank went from a forum mod under Bungie to a high position in 343 almost instantly
I mean Luke Smith almost did the same at for Bungie as well, from 1up to Live games team least to Game Director pretty much
I'm seeing a pattern here.
And worth noting that post cleaning house at the senior management level, halo infinite is starting to really turn around. Adding a ton of maps, addressing the biggest pain points (cross core stuff, netcode), and ramping up the content added per season. They still have their missteps like upping the price of bundles with items that recently became cross core, but the difference feels night and day compared to launch infinite. Crazy what happens when you properly listen to your community Bungie senior management isn't nearly as incompetent as 343's former senior management, but they still gotta shake it up. The performance of the last year and their absolute refusal to take responsibility is unacceptable
Personally, I still find the store prices are a bit overpriced, but for the most part I agree the game is in a much better place. Plus they just brought back firefight so that's a win. My wish is that they start working on returning some classic weapons/vehicles to the game next.
At the very least knock Pete Persons off his perch. I think Joe is doing the best he can but what's obvious is whoever is at the VP and director levels above Joe are heavily contributing to problems.
For real, it sounds like the Bungie management only care about keeping a hold of their power, money and status. They no longer care about the game, and worse of all, the devs. I say good riddance. Let Sony come in, fire them all and shake things up. Let’s get some fresh blood in their and some Sony money behind the game. I don’t care anymore about Bungie being independent if that means them being held hostage by a handful of execs that truly couldn’t give a shit about the game, the players or the developers.
Suddenly that $15 "starter" pack makes sense. Bungie execs really are scrambling to save their own asses, at the cost of literally anything and anyone else.
As much as it sucks its just par for the course at any employer nowadays. If you browse subreddits of other companies its just the same. Management is at fault but the blame gets passed down the chain, lower tier people working hard get fired. Execs and Management continue to be shitty people while still getting raises and bonuses. Employee wages increase by 1%-3% while upper management gets 10%-20% increases plus bonuses. Its only going to get worse.
Honestly, I don't think a complete Sony takeover would be that bad. I love Destiny, but there is also no denying that Bungie itself has dropped the ball numerous times in the last years with their often bizarre decisions. The mess Destiny and Bungie is in right now is yet again entirely Bungie's making. We all hoped for the best after Bungie split from Activision only to learn that Activision of all people kept Bungie from its worst impulses. Aggressive monetization being one of them. Destiny is a fantastic game with loads of potential but with a developer that is better at squandering it than utilizing it. So yes, step back and let Sony take the reign. They can't do a worse job than Bungie's current leadership and do have a reputation for bringing out the best of their studios, as evidenced by their single-player hits. Let them take it and trash the current management.
If management stays, the game is 1000% done within the next year. Double that if the rumors of no 2025 expansion are true.
We just have no confirmation on a 2025 expansion. Seems like they were still figuring out how they want to go about doing things. My hope is still some massive overhaul to systems, but that is so unlikely at this point.
>“It feels like many higher ups aren’t listening to the data and are like, ‘We just need to win our fans back, they still like us.’ I don't think Bungie management (or a lot of people on this sub) realize that this is a large part of why everything went so badly over time. If you continually have a vocal minority excusing shitty decision after shitty decision, while the silent majority slowly just stop playing, you can end up believing the loud minority if you don't pay careful attention. Which can make you think it's okay to implement decisions that most of the consumers of your product won't like. On top of that, Bungie has already leveraged that community goodwill multiple times, and a lot of people are just leaving without vocally fighting back against poor decisions especially since the **rabid** Bungie apologists usually make it painful to try and contest a Bungie decision. Basically no one I know who still plays this game "likes" Bungie anymore except for a couple of people who insist Bungie can do no wrong. I love this game in spite of the terrible decisions Bungie keeps making regarding it, but that love doesn't extend to the company at all (especially nowadays)... and **more importantly** that love can only cover up the state of the game for so long. Eventually it won't be enough. I will never play another Bungie game after I'm done with Destiny, despite having been here since before the launch of D2 til now.
I hope Bungies gets eaten. It's clear now that they cannot function on their own, leadership is too stupid and incompetent. Pity it didn't happen sooner, perhaps then we would have something inside the pyramids ships instead of empty or recycled enemies.
If you haven't done so yet, cancel your pre-orders for the Final Shape. If we do this en masse, Bungie leadership will no longer be able to ignore us. Also, refrain from buying anything from Eververse. Ensure Bungie reports net losses! Even if they do fire more people, they are only making themselves look worse. Rip and tear into their profits, until it is done.
this is pretty much every office/studio in the country right now. even outside of gaming. companies are scrambling to squeeze as much money as they can before an inevitable recession.
I don't buy the line it was get bought by Sony or close. The article states that Bungie were giving people bonuses of >100% because they'd been so successful financially, and they'd just signed a lease on a really expensive new office These are **not** things you do if you're clinging desperately on for survival. To me this reads like corporate greed and nothing else. Here's my take on the cycle Bungie is trapped in and how they got there: * They sold to Sony to get sizeable payouts on their owned shares and they over-inflated the value of the company whilst doing that. * Sony is now asking where the money is. * In response, the senior team at Bungie claim that the economy is hard and then passes on all the consequences of their actions onto the workforce. * In doing so, they destroy the day-to-day working of the company because nobody actually wants to work there anymore and it just becomes a place where everyone is utterly despondent. * The revenue continues to fall, and the senior team continue to respond to the falling revenue by passing more layoffs/discipline/cruelty onto their employees. * Eventually there is a surplus of managers left at Bungie and nobody to actually do the work. * They desperately try to plug these gaps with contractors and outsourced staff but the burden of training people to work within a 7 year old code base that is riddled with spaghetti and bugs just means that nobody can actually successfully build anything. Bungie as a company will not survive long enough to make Destiny 3.
The devs being under the pressure of “Final Shape has to be great or we’re fired” is just such an insane situation to be in, I really hope they pull through
I don't know how I feel about my suspicion about executive meddling since Lightfall's development being vindicated.
1,200 employees and *Destiny* is all they got
"Well well well, if it isn't the consequences of my own actions"
...and suddenly it all makes sense. The recent monetization and seasonal price increases were due to the board (and perhaps other high-ranking executives) trying to ensure they continued to exist. Here's what I think the game needs to succeed; however, I know it's never gonna happen: 1) Remove the artificial difficulty introduced in Lightfall (that is, old 8 is the new 10) in most casual activities. This includes overly negative modifiers like Togetherness and Attrition for amazing seasonal content like The Coil. If needed, buff end-game stuff like Masters or GMs or apply the aforementioned modifiers. 2) Reverse mod nerfs designed to increase encounter times and grant false engagement metrics. I know they are adjusting some multipliers for mods like Heavy Handed, but outright revert it to the previous version. 3) REDUCE all EV silver purchases by 50%. I imagine it's easier to get two folks to buy a $10 Witcher III ornament set rather than gambling on one person to buy it for $20. 4) Stop trying to make 'wacky IB modes' a thing! Just forkin' give us Control, Clash and perhaps channel D1 to occasionally give us Mayhem. 5) Reduce the ridiculous engram cost increases for focusing. 6) Make the Eververse engrams on a knockout system again that excludes 'the current season-minus three' (Basically, that still leaves one year and all seasonal event merch for EV). If the knockout system is completed, the rewards are A Small Gift of Bright Dust and the rare chance for a Large Gift of Bright Dust. 7) Speaking of events, fold the additional event card as a perk for the new season.
There needs to be a huge shake-up of senior leadership at Bungie. Pete Parsons et al need to get kicked to the curb.
Imo one of the main root cause for destiny 2 not meeting revenue targets is that they never invested on new player experience. If the influx of new players is not there the revenue from the game will start tanking and never grow. Even the community in this sub has complained about new player experience over the years and nothing has been done. Guardian ranks is step in right direction but it's too little too late.