Today, Bungie announced that it was laying off 220 employees, or approximately 17 percent of its workforce. The news, which comes on the heels of a successful expansion launch with Destiny 2: The Final Shape in June and another round of layoffs late last year, has prompted former employees and players alike to criticize Bungie’s leadership. To add insult to injury, the company’s CEO locked his account just as the news hit, shielding himself from flak and criticism online.
As news of Bungie’s latest round of layoffs began to get around this morning, fans of the company and games industry colleagues searched for the Twitter account of Pete Parsons, Bungie’s CEO since 2016. Only, once they found him, they realized that he had set his account to private, meaning that only pre-existing followers of Parsons could see his posts and respond to him. Many took to mocking his bio, which features a call to “be brave,” and stated that Parsons wasn’t living up to his own values.
Since then, Parsons, likely reacting to criticisms he was already receiving, has unlocked his account. Despite the gesture, Parsons hasn’t said anything about this morning’s layoffs, and has only shared the blog post via the official Bungie Twitter account.
Coming off the news, disgruntled former employees, fans of Bungie, and voices from around the games industry are now calling for Parsons to take further accountability and step down. Griffin Bennett, a developer who’d been with Bungie from 2018 until the 2023 layoffs, responded to the layoff announcement by calling out Parsons by name and demanding he quit, calling him a “joke.”
Ben Platnick, a former VFX artist at Bungie, went a step further, saying, “Pete needs to fucking go. This is mismanagement at the highest level.” He goes on to claim that Parsons’ “spending on R&D while Destiny was not doing the best would prove to be a money pit with no return. And my friends suffer because of it.”
Among the teams impacted by today’s layoffs, the Player Support team seems to have been particularly gutted. Some members have begun sharing their own stories of the last few months at Bungie working on The Final Shape and their growing distrust in the studio’s leadership, Parsons included.
Others in the games industry have begun chiming in and expressing their discontent with Parsons’ leadership and have joined in on calls for him to resign. Among the voices are Paul Tassi, who covers Destiny for Forbes, and the Destiny-centric content creator MyNameIsByf.
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