Bungie Devs Say Atmosphere Is ‘Soul-Crushing’ Amid Layoffs, Cuts, and Fear of Total Sony Takeover
Bungie Devs Say Atmosphere Is ‘Soul-Crushing’ Amid Layoffs, Cuts, and Fear of Total Sony Takeover - IGN
Unfortunately this is just the norm when a company buys another. I give props to the employees thinking it is still Bungie, but it's not. The second that deal was finalized they became sony employees, and even if on paper they were still Bungie they were always going to become Sony employees.
But business swallows little business. And big business doesn't care about the jobs it leaves behind, or the people. Bungie as we knew it is dead
This isn't a case of Sony just "swallowing" a little business. As the article states Bungie board of directors is 2 people from Sony and 3 people from Bungie, which means that while Sony technically owns Bungie the Bungie leadership still makes decisions about how to run the company. Supposedly there's an obligation on Bungie's part to meet certain financial goals. If Bungie meets those goals Sony can't take over the company.
The problem is that Bungie isn't doing well financially. The Sony takeover is an outcome of Bungie not being able to stay financially independent. That means if Bungie wasn't under Sony then under the same conditions Bungie would most likely go bankrupt instead.
Bungie as we know it being dead has nothing to do with Sony. Bungie management has essentially killed Bungie.
Yes on paper that's how it's all laid out. However anyone who has been through a buyout knows that no parent company intends for the child company to act separately indefinitely. The shotgun clause in there saying they have to do well financially proves it to me. What company hasn't gone through hard times before? Sony may be playing the long game but they'll get control eventually, they always knew they would. It was inevitable that this would happen. Guarantee it was written this way probably with projections on when it would likely happen.
Which is why I say as soon as a buyout occurs the old company is gone. The cool culture you had, the lenient bosses, the small company style benefits? Gone. It may take a bit, but they're going away. Papa business is here and he only cares about the profit margin, not the people, not even the product. They may say it'll stay the same, but drip by drip the company will change, and a few years later you'll realize you aren't working for that cool smaller company anymore, you're working for the big corpos conglomerate.
Imagine buying your freedom from Microsoft only to get acquired by Sony a decade later. I think hindsight being 20/20 they may have just been better off continuing on with Microsoft.
Edit: I'd like to revise my previous position. This is why all devs and studio employees should follow the trend and UNIONIZE IMMEDIATELY.
Under Phil I think they’d be allowed a level of creative freedom but I can’t blame them for wanting to leave under Mattrick; he would have kept them on the Halo hamster wheel forever.
Yea so they got their freedom and made a Halo clone MMO.
Yeah, I totally understand that. I suppose I am biased because I only played the first Destiny game, and to be honest it just always struck me as the Disney Star Wars version of Halo. It just lacked the compelling story elements and refinement of the early Halo games to me, so even back then I wondered if it was worth it for Bungie to separate from Microsoft.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out that's for sure. This smells to me like an attempt to lock Destiny in as a Sony exclusive perhaps. So, the irony is that exactly what Bungie was trying to avoid in large part by splitting from Microsoft may end up happening anyway...
Instead of the Destiny hamster wheel? At least people liked Halo.
Because the game, the vision, the direction and the concept is just not great
There was plenty great about Destiny, the problem is that eventually Bungie just stopped giving a shit about making a good game and focused on milking Destiny for everything they can. Like their biggest changes to gameplay they've done in the last 3 years is to fix the issues they themselves created on prior years. Those fixes are presented as some new cool feature when in reality they're things they should've iterated upon when it was originally introduced.
For instance with armor 2.0 they added armor affinities that would indicate what kind of mods(armor perks) you can use. Dnd then each piece also needed to be upgraded to be able to fit mods into the armor. So not only did you have limited amount of mods you could have you also needed 3 different versions of an armor piece (ideally with a good statline) to fully take advantage of the new build system. They also introduced the artifact which was supposed to be horizontal progression but it contained seasonal mods that you would have to use within the new armor 2.0 system. So you would have to compromise between using seasonal mods vs non-seasonal armor mods.
The biggest feedback they got was that the system is too restrictive and some of the solutions they got was a) get rid of armor affinity and b) make artifact mods into artifact perks. Guess what they introduced this year as a part of their grand plan to shake up the game? Getting rid of armor affinity and turning artifact mods into perks (though they still somewhat act like mods), 3 years after the community told them to do it. And with it they created a new problem for them to fix down the line. They scrapped all the existing armor mods they created in the last 3 years and replaced them with the most uninteresting mods.
And what about the core gameplay loop? That has largely stayed the same for the last, well some would argue since the start of D2. Every activity for the last 3 years has been a variation of stand at a specific place, shoot at a specific thing, carry something from a to b, throw a ball or insert collected things. And obviously shoot mostly the same enemies you've been shooting for the past decade.
In short the game is stale and it's because Bungie has focused on keeping the content treadmill running rather than actually improving the game.
Destiny 1 was an amazing shooter I spent far too much of my life playing.
Destiny 2 was an amazing experience as well...
For the first two years.
I have no idea why they thought they could get away with milking the Light Grind forever. Or why they didn't add better Guild support if they wanted to just turn it into a subscription MMO.
Wrath of the Machine, VoG, King's Fall.....even if you didn't raid, the strikes playlists were a lot of fun.
Rise of Iron and the light level catch up activity with the Archon's Forge was fantastic and made the game a whole lot more fun.
whether or not this happens I hope somebody cleans house on the suits. they seems to be trying to run the company without an ounce of self awareness that they are steering the ship onto the rocks
Yeah, layoffs will do that for you. It's not the best way of increasing employee morale.
Maybe Sonny will decide to support linux... 💅 I have no attachment to bungie as a company just hope that the devs are gonna be ok
So many people framed Activision as the bad guy, when we are seeing that they actually staved off some idiotic decisions on Bungie's part. I have a feeling that while the layoffs are awful, I look at other studios run by Sony and can't help but wonder if the real issue was just at the local management level, and Sony's intervention is maybe needed to save Bungie from itself. Pete Parsons is a piece of shit fuckhead.