Bungie will reportedly delay Destiny 2 expansion The Final Shape
Bungie is reportedly delaying the 2024 Destiny 2 expansion The Final Shape and the company’s new game Marathon following a wave of layoffs, Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier said in a new report. The news comes 16 months after Sony completed its acquisition of Bungie to help make multiplayer games on PS5, promising no major layoffs, and earmarking $1.2 billion to retain talent.
Destiny 2’s The Final Shape will reportedly launch in June 2024 instead of February 2024, while Schreier’s sources say Bungie pushed Marathon to 2025.
Bungie employees announced their layoffs on Twitter, though the Destiny 2-maker hasn’t publicly announced layoffs for either game yet.
The Final Shape is far from the only casualty from the events at Bungie.
Bungie
Sony has been laying off people across all PlayStation divisions in 2023, reportedly as a result of project delays, including the seemingly doomed Last of Us multiplayer game. Naughty Dog quietly terminated a cohort of contractors recently, and reports suggested the Factions game – reportedly “on ice” now – was responsible for the cuts.
Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO Jim Ryan is also stepping down in early 2024, before the end of the company's fiscal year.
Bungie’s layoffs come in a year rife with job losses from Ubisoft, Xbox, several Embracer studios, Unity – separate from the recent runtime fee disaster – and Epic Games, the latter of which laid off nearly 1,000 people and sold Bandcamp, which Epic bought only one year previously. Bandcamp proceeded to lay off more people.
GamesIndustry.biz estimates over 6,000 people have lost their jobs across the sector since January, citing a blend of overinvestment, project delays, and development difficulties in general as the cause.
Meanwhile, Circana executive director Mat Piscatella said the industry is set to gross over $34 billion in 2023, making it the second-best revenue year across the sector since 2020.
