"Inevitable" Does Not Mean "Moral".

This is the second blog post I’ve written today. The first was an economic breakdown of GTA VI’s pricing, but by the time I finished it, news broke of major layoffs at Bungie. In light of that, it felt inappropriate to publish a detached economic analysis of the games industry without acknowledging what that economy produces on the ground.

This morning, Hermen Hulst published an internal memo detailing a wide scale layoff across Bungie, which includes most of the D2 team and even parts of the Marathon Development team, this affected full time employees as well as contractors. For a studio that just yesterday was operating with 850 employees, it would seem now that they’ve been left with around 400, give or take.

This is a collapse in real human terms. The consequences of years of mismanagement, combined with increasing pressure across the industry to deliver immediate returns on long-term investments, are now materializing in full force.

A $3.6 billion acquisition is not something that can realistically be judged on a 3 to 5 year ROI window without enormous pressure on output and restructuring expectations. Bungie was a known-risk acquisition with known structural challenges around production scale, burn rate, and content cadence that were understood within the industry at the time of purchase.

Sony was entering a known-risk acquisition. Bungie’s internal challenges, particularly around production scale, burn rate, and content cadence, were not unknown to the industry at the time of purchase. Even so, the expectation placed on a return of that scale inevitably increases pressure on organizational structure and output.

Comparisons may be drawn by SIE between Bungie and smaller studios like Arrowhead, whose success with Helldivers 2 has been widely praised. But that comparison often ignores differences in scope, structure, and expectations between a live-service megastudio and a relatively lean development team.

Sony’s response, as it appears externally, reflects a familiar pattern in large-scale acquisitions, restructuring driven primarily by short-term financial pressure rather than long-term organizational repair.

It’s easy to reduce this to “just capitalism,” but that framing flattens responsibility. Structural incentives matter, but so do decisions made inside those structures. Both can be true at the same time. Bungie’s internal issues were real, and the people most exposed to the consequences are rarely the ones responsible for creating them.

I can’t believe how short sighted this entire arc has been.

It feels like a known-risk system was left unresolved until failure became unavoidable, and when it failed, the cost was absorbed almost entirely by the people least responsible for the conditions that created it.

This is without even mentioning the widespread slander campaign that has surrounded Bungie for an extended period of time, with many “players” hate-watching Steam charts to the point where Destiny 2 and Marathon became two of the most frequently searched titles on Steam charts for consecutive months.

You will hear grief from people who helped fuel that environment, who did everything in their power to discourage others from engaging with projects that may have needed time to stabilize and evolve. You will hear grief from some of Bungie’s largest creators, who have spent years farming engagement through a cycle of clickbait and doomerism. You will hear grief from people who spent months arguing over whether a game is “for them” or not, and whether it deserves to exist if it is not.

What you will not hear much about, however, is the structural mismanagement of a multi-billion-dollar acquisition. Nuance is rare in these moments, and the online discourse that follows is usually driven by reaction rather than verification, with little incentive for anyone involved to slow down and examine what actually happened beneath the surface.

I am upset about these layoffs, despite the fact that we knew they were coming through extensive reporting from Jason Schreier and Paul Tassi. However, I'm not sure if I'm more upset about the actual layoffs or if I am more upset that someone with more job security than the studio’s developers is going to continue being paid despite having no real understanding of what they are doing when it comes to managing mergers and acquisitions. Though, considering that one is a bastardization of theory while the other affected real people, it is almost assuredly the latter that I'm more upset about.

It is inhumane. It is inhumane to acquire a studio at this scale without a clear long-term plan for its structure, and to allow its internal problems to compound until the only remaining “solution” is mass layoffs. It is inhumane to normalize layoffs as a statistical inevitability rather than what they are in practice, which is people losing their livelihoods overnight.

No one responsible for this situation will face meaningful accountability for how they contributed to it. Instead, the dominant narrative will likely frame this as a uniquely Bungie problem, despite this being the third live-service pivot under Sony Interactive Entertainment this decade that has resulted in shutdowns or severe downsizing. Two of those prior cases ended in studio closures. The current pipeline of live-service projects still in development unfortunately do not look promising if you solicit public perception on the matter.

At the center of it is management. This is what happens when decisions about complex, long-term creative businesses are made through the lens of short-term financial optimization. People are taught in simplified business frameworks that performance is reducible to upward-trending metrics. But real organizations do not behave like spreadsheets. Sustainable success often requires restraint, patience, and tolerance for imperfection while systems mature.

What we are seeing instead is the opposite: reactionary decision-making under pressure, where structural problems are not resolved over time but instead deferred until they become crises that require immediate and damaging correction.

To whatever developer may come across this, affiliated with Bungie or not: you are worth so much more than what some suit will reduce you to to meet a bottom line. You are the backbone of the industry, and you have created incredible things.