Sony President Wants Destiny 2’s Bungie To Be Better With Budgets And Timelines

After recent layoffs, falling Destiny 2 playercounts, revenue projection misses and a delayed expansion, things have been better at Bungie. But new overlord Sony does not appear to be about to go easy on the developer any time soon.

Previously, it was reported that during a Q and A session Sony president Hiroki Totoki made comments about how Sony studios needed to better with timelines and “business.” However, a more recent translation indicates that he was talking about Bungie specifically, not all studios. Here’s what he said:

“I visited the Bungie studios and had meetings with management,” he said, “and I saw that employees working at the studios were highly motivated, showing great creativity as well as an impressive knowledge of live services.

“However, I also felt that there was room for improvement from a business perspective with regard to areas such as the use of business expenses and assuming accountability for development timelines. I hope to continue the dialogue and come up with some good solutions.”

That sounds…not amazing, though also in line with what we’ve seen at Bungie for awhile now. Outside of a few bad eggs, the fanbase of Destiny 2 seems to have come to terms with the idea that 1) individual Bungie devs are working hard and doing a great job on a lot of content given their constraints but 2) Bungie studio management is quite poor and the biggest thing working against the company right now.

That seems to be exactly what Totoki is saying here, praising the devs but the timeline and business aspects would obviously fall on management itself.

It’s pretty clear what Totoki is criticizing here. Destiny 2 has now delayed its three last expansions, resulting in overly long six month final seasons of the year and no doubt reducing revenue in the process. This latest delay was last minute enough where nothing too substantive could be concocted for the midway point like a 30th Anniversary Pack. Past this, it’s possible Marathon or Bungie’s other live games may not be moving as fast as Sony would like. Marathon is supposed to be out in 2025, but that’s already after one major delay. The other games, whatever they are, still don’t have timelines. And now after Helldivers 2 exploding as a success, you can bet the bar for new releases is going to be high.

As for the “business perspective,” well, we already know that Bungie was missing its revenue projections by 45% this year after Lightfall created the largest player drop-off the game has ever seen. But there’s the obvious enormous costs of running a live service like Destiny overall, something that came up in Microsoft acquisition documents where the company was looking at buying Bungie, but cited its high “burn rate” in terms of how much it spends. So Sony may be looking to get that in line, and even after one round of layoffs, that could mean more. But then in turn that means less content no doubt and you can see a spiral starting.

I can’t blame Sony for telling Bungie management to tighten things up because well, management has clearly been slipping for a while now. But at the same time it’s nice to see the hard work of devs acknowledged by top brass. And those are the people who should keep their jobs.

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