News Bungie Is 'Deepening Integration' With Sony As Layoffs Hit Ex-Halo Developer

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Bungie has today announced a "new path" for its future in game development, as the team behind Halo and Destiny "deepens" its relationship with owner Sony. This new path unfortunately includes some layoffs, although the team's further integration with the PlayStation maker appears to have dampened the impact of these job losses.

The developer has laid off 220 people today; roughly 17% of its overall workforce. However, Sony Interactive Entertainment has picked up 155 of those roles - with the end loss being around 5% of Bungie staff once those new Sony roles are factored in.

Here's an update from the team on this round of layoffs and why it's happening:

"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.
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."

What's also interesting here is that, although Destiny content, and Marathon, will still come to Xbox consoles, Bungie is also forming a new studio within PlayStation to work on "an action game set in a brand-new science-fantasy universe". There's no more detail on the project than that right now, but it sounds like this will end up being a PlayStation console exclusive when it launches.

"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."

These are interesting moves from Bungie, and we're curious to see where the studio goes in the coming years under Sony ownership. We're looking forward to seeing more on Marathon especially, because we know that one will release on Xbox!