I was planning on sharing my impressions on Echoes’ exciting Act 2 finale today, but it looks like the writers of that excellent story beat may no longer work for Bungie after a fresh round of layoffs this week. So instead of writing about video games, a thing I love to do, I’m instead spending my day reading posts from ex-Bungie employees, retweeting posts from people looking for job openings, and wondering why the game industry has become such a nightmare for people that make all the games.
I’m so sick of raging about this problem, and I know you’re sick of hearing about it, too. I just looked at the last time I wrote about Bungie layoffs, back in November when 100 developers were callously cut from the team right before the holidays, and wondered if there was anything more to say. This new round cost 220 more people their jobs, while another 155 are getting shipped off to work internally at Sony, and a further 40 are moving to a new studio.
By the numbers alone, this is at least twice as tragic as the last round of layoffs, but when this happens at big studios so frequently, it's easy to get desensitized to it –- to believe, as the greedy executives who cause these things to happen while evading any consequences themselves would like us to, that this is just the nature of business. This is the banality of evil in action. Eventually, the CEOs won’t even need to write their pathetic ‘thoughts and prayers’ tweets right after upending the lives of hundreds of innocent people, because no one will bat an eye when it happens.
It doesn’t matter how many times it has been said before, it needs to keep being said until things change: there is no justification for mass layoffs like this in the game industry. Not at a studio worth $3.6 billion owned by Sony, a company worth $107 billion. Not when leadership promised employees that the Sony deal would not result in layoffs. Not when The Final Shape is a critical and commercial success, outearning Grand Theft Auto 5 and Roblox during its launch month, and not while its CEO Pete Parsons spent two and half million dollars on exotic cars for his private collection in the last year.
I want a better, sustainable industry for game developers, where the people who create the games we love can have some peace of mind that their jobs are secure so long as their work is good. Everyone likes to pretend capitalism is meritocratic, but how do we reconcile that belief with an industry where stuff like this continues to happen? The Final Shape is unanimously beloved, maybe even the best Destiny expansion ever. It has hundreds of thousands of players. The people who made that expansion did a remarkable job and should be rewarded for it, instead of having to file for unemployment today while rich a-holes continue extracting wealth from their labor to buy more Corvettes.
Where’s the accountability? How can Parsons admit it was his poor decision-making that caused hundreds of people to lose their livelihoods, without suffering the same consequences himself? How many of those jobs could have been saved solely with the money Parsons has spent on 1960s sports cars in the last year? It’s maddening to think about.
I don’t know how the game industry rebalances the scales, but I know that what happened at Bungie this week is wrong. I hope the 800 remaining employees form a union they can use to better advocate for themselves, as other studios have in the last few weeks. I hope the company finds stability going forward and begins to operate within its means so that layoffs never happen again. And most importantly, at least today, I hope Parsons finds the humility within himself to take responsibility for these failures and step down. I'm not counting on it though. If he had an ounce of shame in his body, he wouldn’t be inviting his employees to come appreciate his massive car collection just days before laying them off.
