Bungie Creative Team Joins PlayStation to Support Service Games

Recently, Bungie Studio faced a series of disasters, including the layoff of 220 employees from Bungie – equivalent to 17% of the studio’s workforce. However, it seems that some of the studio employees have been integrated into Sony Interactive Entertainment studios.

Today, we learned that the Bungie creative team has joined PlayStation Studios to support Sony’s push towards direct service games. This was revealed during a statement by Bridget O’Neil, who previously served as the Senior Manager for the Bungie creative team, restructuring in an update on LinkedIn this week. She wrote:

“Today was the last day for my team at Bungie, but not the last working day for us in Destiny (and Marathon).”

“Bungie’s creative studios will join PlayStation Studios to build the foundation for a creative team that can support all PlayStation direct service games.”

“As part of this move, I will take on a new role as Senior Creative Director at PlayStation Studios.”

Bungie announced in July the layoff of 220 employees, or 17% of its workforce, alongside plans to deepen integration with parent company Sony. Pete Parsons, CEO of Bungie, stated:

“Firstly, we are working on deepening our integration with Sony Interactive Entertainment, and are working on merging 155 of our roles, which is approximately 12% of our roles, into SIE in the coming quarters.”

“SIE has tirelessly worked with us to identify roles for as many of our employees as possible, allowing us together to retain a significant amount of talent that would have been impacted by the workforce reduction.”

“Secondly, we are working with PlayStation Studios leadership on spinning off one of our incubated projects – a new completely fictional Sci-Fi action game – to form a new studio within PlayStation Studios to continue its promising development.”

Sony has faced significant struggles in its push into the direct service gaming market, including the cancellation of the service game Last of Us and the withdrawal of the game Concord from sale just two weeks after launch. Amidst the pessimistic atmosphere for those projects, it was previously reported that over 50% of PlayStation’s service game projects had completely failed.