Bungie CEO Faces Backlash After Announcing 220 Employees Will Be Laid Off (techspot.com) 39
Rob Thubron reports via TechSpot: It's a sad case of another day, another round of mass layoffs at a game studio. On this occasion, Destiny developer Bungie has announced it is letting go of 220 employees, or 17% of its workforce. CEO Pete Parsons said the eliminations were due to "financial challenges," which isn't going down well, especially after it was discovered he may have spent over $2.4 million on classic cars after Sony acquired the company, and continued buying them even after the previous layoffs. Bungie blames the job eliminations on "rising costs of development and industry shifts as well as enduring economic conditions." The Sony subsidiary says it needs to make substantial changes to its cost structure and focus development efforts entirely on Destiny and Marathon. The cuts will impact every level of the company, including executives and senior leader roles -- but not Parsons, obviously.
In what appears to be a way of reducing the number of people being laid off, Bungie is moving 155 people to Sony Interactive Entertainment over the next few quarters. Furthermore, a team working on one of Bungie's incubation projects -- an action game set in a brand-new science-fantasy universe -- will be spun off to form a new studio within PlayStation Studios. [...] "This is hitting people who were told they were valued. That they were important. That they were critical to business success. But none of that mattered," wrote Bungie technical UX designer Ash Duong.
Many have called for Parsons to resign. The calls were amplified when he set his X account to private, but it seems the CEO realized that was making things worse and soon set it to public again. What's angering people even further is the discovery of what seems to be Parsons' account on a car bidding site called Bring a Trailer. It shows he has spent $2.4 million on classic cars since September 2022, which includes $500,000 since the October layoffs.
In what appears to be a way of reducing the number of people being laid off, Bungie is moving 155 people to Sony Interactive Entertainment over the next few quarters. Furthermore, a team working on one of Bungie's incubation projects -- an action game set in a brand-new science-fantasy universe -- will be spun off to form a new studio within PlayStation Studios. [...] "This is hitting people who were told they were valued. That they were important. That they were critical to business success. But none of that mattered," wrote Bungie technical UX designer Ash Duong.
Many have called for Parsons to resign. The calls were amplified when he set his X account to private, but it seems the CEO realized that was making things worse and soon set it to public again. What's angering people even further is the discovery of what seems to be Parsons' account on a car bidding site called Bring a Trailer. It shows he has spent $2.4 million on classic cars since September 2022, which includes $500,000 since the October layoffs.
He's paid too much (Score:5, Insightful)
If the company is failing financially, it's the CEO's fault, they're in charge of it.
He's doing his job poorly, so shouldn't get paid so many millions.
Root Cause Analysis; Contracts. (Score:5, Insightful)
If the company is failing financially, it's the CEO's fault, they're in charge of it. He's doing his job poorly, so shouldn't get paid so many millions.
We see CEOs fail viciously and arrogantly all the time and get rewarded. We see CEOs even (finally) get fired for doing that bad, only to float away under a diamond-encrusted solid-gold paraglider, powered by burning severance money.
What really needs to stop in business, are the very executive employment contracts that legally enable and protect that kind of fuckery.
No one should get rewarded for failure, unless that is the only goal.
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The money going to the CEOs comes out of the shareholders' pockets, and the shareholders have the power to stop it.
Limits on CEO pay often come up at shareholder meetings, often put forward by activists.
They are almost always voted down.
Shareholders generally don't care about this issue because, although the CEO's salary may sound big in absolute terms, it is usually tiny compared to the company's revenues.
The correlation between CEO pay and company profits is negative, with better-paid CEOs delivering wors
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The ones who have the power to rein things in are the members of the board
1. The shareholders elect the BOD, and their views on compensation are often an issue.
2. America has a "say on pay" law that gives shareholders a direct vote on executive pay.
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For the shareholders large enough to matter, this CEO behavior is actually desirable and they seek to incentivize it.
Large shareholders are well diversified and they can't lose more than 100% of any long position. If 1/10th of their holdings fail and 1/10th doubles they're even before considering any other growth in their other holdings. They can tolerate much higher risk in each individual holding if it is increasing the expected return to match.
By comparison employees of the company including executives w
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> it is usually tiny compared to the company's revenues
This logic seems to apply to employees though. Cutting back on training, travel, coffee in the break rooms, etc. If they are going to count every nickel and dime for the employees they can do it for the execs.
Re: He's paid too much (Score:1)
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If the company is failing financially, it's the CEO's fault, they're in charge of it. He's doing his job poorly, so shouldn't get paid so many millions.
On the flip side ... if CEOs are so worthless, then don't work for them.
Start your own company, and run it as a workers collective or whatever.
Since that's so much better, and CEOs are useless, you will out-compete those CEO-run companies pretty quickly ... right?
Really touched some modders' nerves, lol!
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Parsons has been a Bungie C-level executive since 2002. So he's been around through a lot of success and two acquisitions. It's not clear how much he's paid; Bungie is a subsidiary, not a public company. One site claims $600,000 but the source of that isn't clear. But the fact that he spent $2.4 million in cars recently doesn't mean he's being paid millions.
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Yet they always give these thieves golden parachutes to reward them for failure.
Bungie died a long time ago (Score:1, Interesting)
Halo 3 for the xbox 360... now that was a video game. Reach and that ODST spinnoff game were pretty good too, although ODST was more of an expansion pack that got sold as a full game because reasons. (greed)
and then they spent 10 years working on something called destiny which was like a half baked halo game with bits of diablo mixed in. Real disappointing. They started chasing that games as a service business model instead of creating good video games.
Bungie died a long time ago (Score:5, Interesting)
When they sold off to Microsoft. Halo was supposed to launch on Macs.
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Yeah, that's why they bought all those Mac G5s to demo games at E3 when the Xbox was PowerPC based. So yeah, GTFOH. You don't like MacOS, fine ... but at least they didn't try to ship something like Recall and they haven't shipped garbage like CoPilot that helps bad devs code by pulling from GitHub regardless of project license. SMFH
Also, not a Mac user but arrogant dipshits irritate me.
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dude, you didn't let him finish he was saying
Macs are shit at sucking, granted it is difficult to suck as much as MS but they could at least try to suck a bit more.
also don't feed the troll.
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And I recall it was supposed to be mainly multiplayer.
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When they sold off to Microsoft. Halo was supposed to launch on Macs.
The first two Myth games were amazing and so much fun, especially multiplayer (Dorf Rockets, anyone?), and I spent so much time on Halo and Halo 2. I have tried to play Destiny, but it just feels so "grindy," and F2P players are at a distinct disadvantage which takes away the fun. I think that the people who run Bungie are just out of new ideas.
Nuts (Score:2)
What a wasted article.
I saw "Bungie CEO"m and was expecting Dilbert . . .
Not played Destiny in a long time... (Score:3)
Bungie swore up and down that they weren't trying to hit some kind of threshold for sales, but then it came out that they got a $25M bonus for "X number of sales" in the first year. Every DLC purchase counted as a separate sale, and hence the focus on the DLCs. They were lying out of both sides of their mouths.
I feel bad for the devs, but I also think Bungie was prepared to do something like this regardless of any level of success.
CEOs' personal funds and layoffs, oh my (Score:4, Insightful)
When a corporation offers shares to the public, people like you and me can buy those shares.
We hope at some time after we buy them they'll be worth more, which is when we'll sell them.
Until we sell, it's numbers on a screen. "Buy low, sell high" -- you get it.
The people who have stock whether they purchased it or sweat-equity got it, or employee bonus
or options have the same numbers on a screen, and they can sell and get real cash, just like any
other shareholder.
When someone acquires a company, typically the original ownership share (some or all of which
may be nonpublic, restricted from trading or locked down under certain terms and conditions) is
bought out by the buyer. The seller then has oodles of real money and the buyer has stock they
expect to grow in value.
The CEO of X company (e.g. Bungie) got cash money for his shares, and went out and finally
bid on some exotic cars. That's his reward for bringing Bungie to where someone else wanted
to pay more for it.
Employee salaries come from Bungie the corporation. They do not come from the CEO or anyone
else. Just like YOU and ME can go buy (e.g. Microsoft) shares and watch them go up and one day sell,
YOU and ME are in no way responsible for the operation of Microsoft, its staffing, its layoffs, employee
salaries etc.
It's a red herring to point to the CEO's personal life choices in buying exotic, antique, or just plain cool
cars. (BringATrailer is well known and highly respected but that's neither her nor there). What he does
with HIS PERSONAL MONEY is HIS BUSINESS. Ditto for Musk and his stupidly named company,
Bezos and his WashPo rag (or Amazon), Branson with his bankrupt Virgin Orbit or his successful
Virgin Air, etc.
If you want to rise up against layoffs, start with noticing that unemployment in the US is at an all time
low, but new people are constantly turning 16, 18, etc. and taking jobs, and that means even if
unemployment was ZERO the influx of new "talent" means some jobs are lost to them, and even
without new talent employers are CONSTANTLY trying to improve "shareholder value" (you know
that stock you bought in paragraph one above -- companies and YOU and ME want it to grow in
value). One way they do that is automation. Another way is the so-called "AI". Another is multi-
tasking -- one employee can be on 10 chat windows just being "a little slow to respond" vs 10
reps on 10 phone lines. That's economy of scale.
SO if your friend got fired, hate on layoffs. It has nothing to do with what the CEO spends.
ASIDE: Yes, a lot of CEOs are GROSSLY OVERPAID for the little good they do. That's where
the shareholders get to try to vote in new management. The process is more rigged than a
Republican at an election booth so good luck with that.
Re:CEOs' personal funds and layoffs, oh my (Score:5, Insightful)
There is a very broken mindset and understanding in anybody who believes that a CEO pays for salaries using *THEIR OWN PERSONAL MONEY*.
It never ceases to amaze me the ideas that get in some people's heads. No one thinks what you're claiming here because of course that's absurd. What people are upset about is the fact that people are getting laid off which means the CEO did a bad job somewhere but they aren't feeling any pain for it.
So in other words what people a upset about is that the laid off employees are paying the price for the CEOs bad choices meanwhile the CEO is off happily blowing millions on cars.
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Since we're all about AI and crypto, which use an abundance of energy which tends to not come from green sources, we are failing spectacularly at that.
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You don't understand why people are upset. They're not upset for any reason you detail in your overly long post. They're upset that the CEO fucked up somewhere (hence the need for layoffs) but it's the employees who suffer via losing their source of income meanwhile the CEO is doing just fine with plenty of money to blow on classic cars.
The employees are suffering for the CEOs mistakes. Turns out people don't like the idea of employees taking the hit for something that wasn't their fault while those whose f
No one gets "Laid Off" from BUNGIE (Score:3)
Its more like they get "BOUNCED"
Shaawinggg...
What? (Score:3)
as well as enduring economic conditions.
Is there no excuse companies can find? What bullshit is this? If this is their excuse they need to define what "enduring economic conditions" are forcing them to lay off these people.
This is like a company claiming they can't find someone to fill a job in the middle of a recession.
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as well as enduring economic conditions.
Is there no excuse companies can find? What bullshit is this? If this is their excuse they need to define what "enduring economic conditions" are forcing them to lay off these people.
This is like a company claiming they can't find someone to fill a job in the middle of a recession.
"Enduring economic conditions" in this context means "our bland, formulaic, cookie-cutter, same as last year games aren't selling for $70 any more in the quantities we'd like".
Bungie have essentially made 1 game and even that wasn't very good in it's time. If it had been a PC game it would have been forgotten about.
Yet another psychopathic CEO (Score:2)
Re: Yet another psychopathic CEO (Score:2)
Don't worry about Bungie (Score:3)
Bungie will bounce back