A $3.6 billion USD company

Wow, we did not even have to wait long. The news just dropped, and Bungie is estimated to be firing at least half of their entire workforce.

Decoding the corporate PR:

If you read the official statement they pushed out, it is a display of pure cowardly HR jargon. They cannot even bring themselves to say "layoffs". Instead, we get a sanitised "reduction in force".

The absolute best part is where the leadership claims Destiny 2 "fell short of expectations these past several years". They are openly admitting they spent the last few years driving their only profitable franchise straight into the dirt. Even funnier, they casually blame the game for falling short instead of taking a single ounce of accountability for their own disastrous executive decisions.

They also mention their future projects are "still in early incubation". Hold on a minute. What about Marathon? You guys literally just pushed a desperate Season 2 update and a massive Free Week. Are we just memory-holing Marathon entirely now? It reads like they already know the game is completely dead on arrival.

The inevitable:

It was an absolute given at this point. Even with a massive 50% staff reduction, with the vast majority of those cuts carved straight out of the Destiny 2 team, the core issue for Bungie remains completely unsolved. Their current and sole active product literally cannot make back its own development costs.

What about the estimated 400 employees left in the building? Yeah, Marathon absolutely cannot sustain that headcount, let alone act as the prestigious poster boy for Sony's live-service ambitions. The maths simply does not work.

A decade of unhinged mismanagement:

I sincerely hope the affected developers were already looking for new jobs the exact moment Bungie announced Destiny 2 was ceasing active development. The grim reality of this situation was staring everyone right in the face.

Bungie is a studio that possessed every conceivable resource and decades of institutional knowledge. They built some of the most insanely successful shooters in gaming history, yet they have somehow been horribly mismanaged for well over a decade without a single shred of meaningful intervention. They essentially rode the wave of their past glory straight into a solid brick wall.