Internal Details Emerge Amid Bungie Layoffs And Destiny 2 The Final Shape Delay

Bungie employees have been hit with layoffs this week, and Destiny 2's upcoming expansion The Final Shape has been delayed. Now we have more details from an internal source on what went down inside Bungie this week, and employee thoughts on the situation thanks to Paul Tassi over at Forbes.

We highly suggest following the Forbes article for all the info, but a few of note are:

- Prior to the layoffs, some executives forfeited their annual bonuses earlier this year, although employees were not informed about this move until this week. The total of bonuses forfeited is not known at this time.

- As you might imagine, employees are extremely angry with leadership and are voicing their frustrations in meetings. There is frustration over those who made the mistakes which led to this situation still remaining in charge.

- The in-game Looking For Group tool had been tremendously difficult from a tech perspective and was actually announced to the communities before it was the devs. There's still a long road ahead before LFG will be in the game despite it being an obvious day-one feature.

- Microtransactions have been discussed, with some advocating for the pairing back of monetization, but the reply is always that they are necessary for the survival of the game given how expensive Destiny 2 is to operate. Event Cards apparently sell well.

- Bungie wants to be a multi-IP studio, with Marathon being the first step towards that, so there are no plans for some mass migration from Destiny 2 to Marathon once it goes live.

Overall it feels like the majority of hope is on the release of The Final Shape to carry Bungie forward, and many employees are angry with the current state of affairs within the developer, rightfully so. Given the company missing sales projections by an astounding 45% (and the company saying those projections weren't outlandish or unrealistic numbers), it's hard to imagine the situation being worse...but it continues to become so.

Makes you wonder what shape the company would be in right now had they NOT been purchased by Sony. Something we literally brought up on today's Always Online podcast!