Sony paid too much for Bungie admit developers as Destiny 2: The Final Shape sales fall short-Adam Starkey-Entertainment – Metro

The Final Shape may have been the final nail (Bungie)

A former Bungie employee has claimed Sony’s acquisition of the studio was doomed from the start, as Destiny 2 fails to hit financial targets.

The future of Bungie and Destiny 2 is looking bleak, after the studio announced it was laying off 17% of its workforce last week, which comes after a wave of job cuts last year.

The recent layoffs come after Bungie released Destiny 2 expansion The Final Shape in June, which was widely praised as a return to form. Despite the positive critical and player reception though, it seems the expansion failed to meet financial expectations at launch.

According to a source at Bungie, The Final Shape sold less than last year’s expansion Lightfall, which met with a far more mixed reception. While it’s difficult to gauge how well Lightfall sold, Bungie described it as having ‘surpassed our sales expectations’ last year.

When comparing the launch sales between the two expansions, one former Bungie employee said: ‘It sold less than Lightfall. The financials just don’t work. Destiny is an incredibly expensive game to make.’

Speaking to the GameFile newsletter, one former employee at the studio said they believed Sony paid too much when it spent $3.6 billion acquiring Bungie in 2022.

‘I think Sony overpaid for Bungie,’ said one anonymous source. ‘I think Bungie sold things they were just not able to deliver.’

According to three former employees, Bungie’s leaders ‘overstated their studio’s financial prospects to Sony, and Wednesday’s cuts were needed to stop continued losses that amounted to an ongoing reality check’.

In line with previous reports, sources also claim that Bungie failed to meet financial targets it had promised Sony, with the studio suffering losses since Lightfall in February last year.

For context, Sony’s purchase of Bungie was far more expensive than any of their other acquisitions. The company bought Insomniac Games for $229 million in 2020, a studio which has seen far more success between Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales and Marvel’s Spider-Man 2.

Many suspect that the purchase of Bungie was a knee jerk reaction to Microsoft’s acquisition of Bethesda for $7.5 billion, in 2020. And in one sense it could be argued that Sony keeping Bungie, the creators of Halo, out of Microsoft’s hands makes good business sense no matter what is done with them afterwards.

Sony originally bought Bungie in the hopes of expanding its live service titles, but that has so far yielded very little success – with Concord being the first to be released this month.

Amid the recent layoffs, 155 roles at Bungie (12% of the workforce) are being integrated into Sony Interactive Entertainment over the next few months. This move was described as a way to ‘save a great deal of talent’ from losing their jobs.

In a statement from Bungie CEO Pete Parsons, it acknowledged that the studio was ‘overly ambitious’ as it tried to create a new project alongside Destiny 2 and Marathon. ‘Our financial safety margins were subsequently exceeded, and we began running in the red,’ Parsons said.

Following the layoffs, Parsons has been blamed for the job losses by some former employees, who highlighted how he’s spent $2.3 million on classic cars.

Destiny 2’s future looks dim (Bungie)

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