The Daily Populous Friday August 9th, 2024 night edition
Authored by pcgamer.com and submitted by HilariousGaming

Post-layoff justifications are fast becoming their own brand of technobabble. In case you're out of the loop, Bungie laid off 220 employees late last month due to "rising costs of development", "economic conditions", and all the things you're used to hearing by now.

The initial statement did at least paint some kind of proper picture. A model of "incubation projects" that "stretched our talent too thin, too quickly" was cited, with the layoffs characterised as a restructuring and refocusing on the studio's central games: Destiny and Marathon.

Despite that, the restructuring blindsided several employees, while others claim the layoffs—caused by an over-promising and under-delivering studio—had been in the pipeline regardless of whether or not The Final Shape (Destiny 2's latest expansion) performed well.

Strap yourself in, because Sony has more buzzwords to pitch at you like so much spaghetti thrown against a grim, industry-wide wall. During the quarterly Sony Group Corporation's financial results briefing (thanks, GamesRadar) Sony Interactive Entertainment chairman (plus Sony Group CFO and COO) Hiroki Totoki stated when asked about the company's restructuring efforts:

"For this restructuring the purpose is cost, the structure, and portfolio optimization. Those are the purposes. And simultaneously, we have to enhance the efficiency of the business." Totoki then went on to state that "there will be some re-allocation of the resources" to the wider Sony group, concluding with a quick: "We'd like to optimise our overall studio structure, that's all, thank you."

These are words that have been translated by a live interpreter—but I'm still pretty confident they're downright fluff on content alone. We've seen this kind of vagueness before from Microsoft after the shuttering of Tango Gameworks, a unique allergy that occurs when you go above a certain pay threshold that makes you unable to answer direct questions.

Cue an avalanche of waffling about economic conditions, streamlining, optimisation, and the oft-invoked prayers to the ancient chthonic gods of flexibility. These are all words often brought up by the exact leadership responsible for placing their studios at risk in the first place—leadership which, barring extreme circumstances, will be keeping its job. The grim tidings of 2023 and 2024 will continue until the efficiencies have had their portfolios optimised and the leanness becomes flexibly refocused, or something.

Retro_Vista on August 8th, 2024 at 16:54 UTC »

Silly title. Those are the exact reasons for the layoffs...

Bungie ballooned up to nearly 1500 employees at their max and were juggling employees between multiple projects to the point where they were all suffering or not progressing at all.

So yes Bungie heads overstaffed for multiple projects going nowhere and that is what required them to be restructured and they needed to become more "optimized" by working on less projects at once that they can't manage and become more "efficient" at releasing content/games...

What a ridiculous way to title an article

DizzySkunkApe on August 8th, 2024 at 12:54 UTC »

What else would it be for?

Radiolotek on August 8th, 2024 at 12:48 UTC »

Bungie was neglecting the one thing actually making them money and diverting funds to multiple start up projects.

In the process they put Destiny in a horrible place and acted surprised when numbers tanked.

The management need to be replaced. According to most of the developers, the management team are clueless about their game and make horrible decisions concerning it.

Sony is not to blame here.