The Final Shapewas ahuge show of force forDestiny 2, but it’s success hasn’t stopped the recent bout of bad news out of Bungie. In a downright catastrophic announcement made recently, Bungie CEO Pete Parsons announcedthe studio would lose about 30% of its staff, and further integrate into Sony. A TWID blog post, then, isn’t happening.
More specifically, Bungie has now clarified that it’s going to skip the weekly This Week inDestinyblog post in light of the unprecedented layoffs that happened this week. Well, it’s notwhollyunprecedented if I’m being honest, as something similar happened ahead ofThe Final Shape‘s late-2023 delay.
“Whilst we look forward to sharing more of our future plans at a later time,” says Bungie, “this week is about supporting each other.” This also includes that hundreds of talented, veteran staff members that have lost their jobs mere days ago.
Don’t expect a TWID this week
“While our team is taking this time to help support each other, we want you, our community, to know that we expect no disruption to all of our previously communicated content plans,” says Bungie’s statement on Reddit. “Our content roadmap remains unchanged. This also includes our future plans for next year and beyond.” This is good news forDestinyfans, at least, but it hardly resolves the bigger issue at hand.
To say that Bungie’s been in hot water over the past couple of years is an understatement of the decade. Late in 2023, Bungie staff reported that working at the company wasnothing short of “soul-crushing,”and it’s not hard to see how these reports might’ve affected the remaining Bungie veterans – who have now been just about literally decimated – in terms of morale.
These are hard,hardtopics. The kind of stuff you don’t generally want to discuss in a blog post, really. With that in mind, it’s not necessarily a bad thing that this week’s TWID isn’t going to happen. Next week’s TWID, though, is going to be interesting: whether Bungie chooses to contend with what’s been going on as of late, or opts to mostly ignore it with occasional lip service to the problem at hand, there’s no good way to handle it no matter what.
Back whenIGN’s Rebekah Valentine first reported on the Bungie developers’ claimsthat the atmosphere at the company was soul-crushing, one of the most pointed comments came from an unknown staffer: “Everyday I walk in afraid that I or my friends are next. No one is safe.” Bungie’s chief people officer Holly Barbacovi, on the flip side, purportedly said that layoffs were a “lever” that the company would inevitably pull again. When asked whether the leadership had considered taking salary cuts at the time, sources claim that the response was that Bungie was “not that type of company.”
I can’t help but wonder, then, what kind of company might Bungie be in two years time? The missing TWID was never going to referencethat, though, so the blog itself isn’t that big of a deal.
