One month after a major round of layoffs impacted roughly 100 Bungie employees of 1,200,those remaining at the Destiny developer say the cuts, as well as other cost-cutting measures, came alongside an apparent scramble by studio leadership to avoid a total Sony takeover.

As it currently stands, Bungie is (on paper) a fully independent subsidiary of Sony. But its board of directors has been divided since the takeover in July of 2022. Among its current members are PlayStation Studios head Hermen Hulst, Sony senior VP Eric Lempel, Bungie co-founder Jason Jones, Bungie CTO Luis Villegas, and Bungie CEO Pete Parsons. The board as a whole is split between Sony and Bungie representatives, with Parsons serving as a tiebreaker vote. But speaking to IGN under condition of anonymity, multiple current and former Bungie employees described a department meeting that took place shortly after the layoffs, in which leaders hinted that this shared power may not last forever.

Sony did not respond to IGN's request for comment on this piece. Bungie declined to comment.

Another anxiety sources discussed with us was that many of the reductions made at Bungie recently were part of a broader move toward outsourcing. Multiple individuals across various departments told us they'd heard discussions within their teams of plans to increase outsourcing both before and in the wake of the layoffs.

One team where those discussions have already become reality is in Quality Assurance [QA]. While outsourcing QA is extremely common practice industry-wide, Bungie historically has also enlisted an army of in-house, embedded QA testers working within individual teams. It's a set-up the studio has prided itself on for years now, but QA sources within the studio are now afraid that strategy is on its way out. We previously reported that Bungie's QA team saw a rash of mysterious departures in the months before the layoffs, and also noted a team-wide culture shift toward a general pool of testers consisting of both in-house and outsourced individuals. Former and current QA department members at Bungie tell us that in the last year, the team has seen increasing workloads and responsibilities, with more and more disciplinary actions taken for seemingly minor infractions. They also perceive growing hostility from team and company leadership, including a meeting in which QA was said to be referred to by leaders as "non-developers."In total, sources tell us that over 10% of Bungie's internal QA department was either fired or laid off between early October and early November, including both the reported layoffs and the departures leading up to them.

In a year that will go down in gaming history due to the sheer number of layoffs and studio closures, Bungie's situation nonetheless stands out, and not for good reasons. It's a well-known, long-standing studio that, despite historic culture problems, had managed to cultivate an increasingly positive community of fans around a beloved game while improving its own internal culture by gradual degrees. Butin the wake of an acquisition that shocked many Bungie employees we've spoken to, and which seemed out of character with the studio's independent streak, it feels to many like that's all falling apart. Beloved colleagues have been laid off, benefits are vanishing, and many feel the "more people-oriented" (as one source put it) culture of recent years is being torn to pieces by the very Bungie leaders that touted it for so long. And seemingly all so those same leaders can retain a vestige of control over a company that's already been sold away anyway.

"Folks still there are very much feeling 'us vs them' between leadership and workers," one person said. "That trust has been eroded."

Given their recent actions, the question of whether or not Sony will finally manage to swallow Bungie whole in a few months seems less and less important than the question of what Bungie's current management will do to lead the company forward today.

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