New article with more details (from Jason Schreier who first broke the story). If you can't see it, I'll copy the whole text under read more.
About 100 employees were laid off in total (8%) and one of the main reasons listed is "underperformance," "sharp drop in popularity" and "poor reception of Lightfall."
So you know when for the last year and a half content creators have been shitting and pissing on the game as a full-time job and the amount of negativity and ragebait content became the only thing to make content about for them? Well they certainly won't take the blame, but I will let it be known. These people either don't understand the influence they have or they do and they're doing it on purpose, and I don't know which of these two options is worse, but I am 100% confident that their campaign of rage and hate contributed to this.
You don't base your entire community around constantly hating everything about the only game you play (despite clearly not enjoying it anymore) and somehow avoid galvanising thousands and thousands of people into perceiving the game negatively. Imagine being employees who have barely worked there for 2 years and the only community reception they've seen is 24/7 hate train for their work and then they get fired because of "poor reception" and "drop in popularity." How can they not take that personally? I am absolutely devastated for these people who delievered a banger product and who were met with an unrelenting barrage of toxic gamer children which ended up having more sway over their boss than them.
Which brings me to the next bit and that's FUCK THE CEO. He is now my mortal enemy #1. I am projecting psychic blasts directly into his brain. What an absolute spineless coward who is more willing to bow down to fucking gamers than to protect his own employees. This is absolutely rage inducing because this has happened before. From the article from 2021 about the toxic culture at Bungie:
Reading this shit from the new article absolutely fucking sent me into blind rage because I immediately remembered this. Another instance of employees suffering because of comments on reddit. And because of toxic players. And proof that leadership is not protecting employees and is instead siding with players.
Match made in heaven. Asshole gamer content creators and asshole CEOs, all of whom sit at home on piles of money made from someone else's labour. I hope they all explode. None of the people that worked on this game deserve this.
Another article with an infuriating comment from the CEO:
In an internal town hall meeting addressing a Monday round of layoffs that impacted multiple departments, Bungie CEO Pete Parsons allegedly told remaining employees that the company had kept “the right people” to continue work on Destiny 2.
"Kept the right people." Really. Veteran composers weren't the right people? Die!
Bloomberg article in full:
Bungie’s decision to cut an estimated 100 jobs from its staff of about 1,200 followed dire management warnings earlier this month of a sharp drop in the popularity of its flagship video game Destiny 2.
Just two weeks ago, executives at the Sony-owned game developer told employees that revenue was running 45% below projections for the year, according to people who attended the meeting.
Chief Executive Officer Pete Parsons pinned the big miss on weak player retention for Destiny 2, which has faced a poor reception since the release of its latest expansion, Lightfall.
The next expansion, The Final Shape, was getting good — not great feedback — and management told those present that they planned to push back the release to June 2024 from February, according the people, who asked not to be identified because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly. The additional time would give developers a chance to improve the product.
In the meantime, Parsons told staff Bungie would be cutting costs, such as for travel, as well as implementing salary and hiring freezes, the people said. Everyone would have to work together to weather the storm, he said, leaving employees feeling determined to do whatever was needed to get revenue back up.
But on Monday morning the news got worse: Dozens of staffers woke up to mysterious 15-minute meetings that had been placed on their calendars, which they soon learned were part of a mass layoff. Bungie laid off around 8% of its employees, according to documentation reviewed by Bloomberg. Bungie didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Employees who were let go will receive at least three months of severance and three months of Bungie-paid COBRA health insurance, although other benefits, such as expense reimbursements, ended Monday, sending some staff racing to submit their receipts.
Laid-off staffers will also receive prorated bonuses, although those who were on a vesting schedule following Sony Group Corp.’s acquisition of Bungie in January 2022 will lose any shares that weren’t vested as of next month.
The layoffs are part of a larger money-saving initiative at Sony’s PlayStation unit, which has also cut employees at studios such as Naughty Dog, Media Molecule and its San Mateo office.
TD Cowen analyst Doug Creutz wrote in a report Monday that “events over the last few days lead us to believe that PlayStation is undergoing a restructuring.”
PlayStation president Jim Ryan announced last month that he plans to resign.
Many of the layoffs at Bungie affected the company’s support departments, such as community management and publishing. Remaining Bungie staff were informed that some of those areas will be outsourced moving forward.
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It's really funny to think about the whole custody battle people are having over Hunter when you remember he is is sixteen and all but fully independent like it does not matter who has official/legal custody of him he's still just gonna go wherever he wants and that's what he did. Literally why would he pick one household to live in when the entire point of his character arc is that he doesn't want to be confined to any one place or occupation (he wants to carve palismen, he wants to play flyerderby, he wants to go to school, and he wants to make cosplay and sew wolf t-shirts all of which are things he'll want to be in different places for generally)
And it's so funny to me when people concede to coparenting like some kind of compromise but they think that they are going to have a post-divorce Hunter spends weekdays with one family and weekends with another situation like how did you miss the whole point of found family in this series.
Hunter doesn't switch between the Deamonne, Noceda, and Clawthorne-Whispers families because they're the same family now. Everybody came together. They all became Luz's family, Hunter included.
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Feel like face blindness is underestimated as a thing that Completely Fucks Up your ability to socialise and make friends, especially when its combined with time blindness.
Want friends but cant recognise people and have no idea when you last talked to someone?
The only way you can do that is to be in a situation where the same people show up in the same place at the same time, or/AND where said people approach you first and frequently enough to where you can figure out a way to find them that doesnt involve needing to know what they look like.
Oh, you already did that? Well now you have to actually remember they exist and contact them. Regularly. And pretend you care. You wish you did.
Even worse if you're depressed or otherwise emotionally suppressed naturally or otherwise. As a lot of autistic people are. Its not at all surprising no one makes an effort to hang out with someone who never recognises them, never contacts them, and if they do has nothing they want to say and has no response to anything you do or say, and shows no sign they even like you at all.
But people are still really cool. Wish my brain actually wanted anything to do with them sometimes. Would be nice.
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