In the wake of Bungie announcing massive layoffs, a new report claims that the developer will still create content updates for Destiny 2, but they will be lighter and smaller.
A screenshot from Destiny 2: The Final Shape (2024), Bungie
Bungie CEO and Chariman Pete Parsons announced the layoffs in a blog post stating, “Due to rising costs of development and industry shifts as well as enduring economic conditions, it has become clear that we need to make substantial changes to our cost structure and focus development efforts entirely on Destiny and Marathon.”
He then declared, “That means beginning today, 220 of our roles will be eliminated, representing roughly 17% of our studio’s workforce. These actions will affect every level of the company, including most of our executive and senior leader roles.”
A screenshot from Destiny 2: The Final Shape (2024), Bungie
Parsons later revealed that not only was the company laying off 220 people, but it had shifted 155 people to Sony Interactive Entertainment, Bungie’s parent company and was spinning off an incubation project into its own studio. It’s believed that includes around 75 people.
He stated, “First, we are deepening our integration with Sony Interactive Entertainment, working to integrate 155 of our roles, roughly 12%, into SIE over the next few quarters. SIE has worked tirelessly with us to identify roles for as many of our people as possible, enabling us together to save a great deal of talent that would otherwise have been affected by the reduction in force.”
“Second, we are working with PlayStation Studios leadership to spin out one of our incubation projects – an action game set in a brand-new science-fantasy universe – to form a new studio within PlayStation Studios to continue its promising development,” he added.
A screenshot from Destiny 2 (2019), Bungie
In the wake of this announcement, Jeff Grubb at Giant Bomb detailed, “Basically, they are going to continue working on Marathon and Destiny 2. They are going to keep making new content for Destiny 2. Now, when it comes to Destiny 2, the expectation, I believe, internally is that the future content will be lighter, smaller to take less time than what The Final Shape did, require fewer people.”
He continued, “So, there will be expansions and updates, but they will sort of be not a shell of their former selves, but they’ll definitely have that vibe about them.”
Grubb later added, “Destiny 2 continuing to go. Probably starting up some new seasons or whatever.”
Destiny 2 nearly hit its peak concurrent player when it released The Final Shape at the beginning of June. The game hit 314,634 concurrent players the day the expansion dropped. The game’s overall peak concurrent players is 316,750. However, that peak concurrent player base has shrunk to 50,789 as of the last 24-hours according to SteamDB.
A screenshot of Destiny 2’s concurrent player numbers via SteamDB
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The previous expansion Lightfall released at the end of February 2023 and took the game to its all-time peak concurrent player count of 316,750. The game had much stronger concurrent player numbers in its first two months compared to The Final Shape.
By the end of April 2023, it hit a peak concurrent player base of 96,824, which is nearly double The Final Shape’s concurrent player numbers after about two months.
A screenshot from Destiny 2: Lightfall (2023), Bungie
What do you make of this report that Bungie will be changing the way it releases new content and updates for Destiny 2?
