Anonymous former staff brand leadership toxic and unaccountable
A new video from Youtuber Destin Legarie includes a number of allegations about Destiny 2 and Marathon developers Bungie from anonymous former employees. Amongst other things, we hear that Bungie staff once proposed a Destiny subscription model, but were “vehemently shut down” by leaders. There are also lots of claims about toxic, unaccountable management, and some throwaway insights about how the company’s culture has changed in the course of being acquired by Sony.
I confess, the part that catches my eye is a smaller detail: there was apparently concern that a particular Destiny 2 armour set would be so compelling for players, it might stop them hoovering up new gear in the Eververse cosmetics store. I find this intriguing because it speaks to the tricky line I imagine most artists have to walk when calibrating the appeal of outfits in loot-driven games with microtransactions. You don’t want any of your work to look ugly, but there needs to be an obvious distinction between the included drops and the bits you’re selling separately. It seems like it should be fun, in the absence of tyrannous executives, to haggle over that distinction.
Destin Legarie’s video is a mixture of paraphrase and quotation. He doesn’t share much background on his sources, or indicate how many he’s spoken to, so it’s not clear how representative all this is of the current mood at Bungie.
Sources in the video accuse the company’s leadership of being arbitrary, high-handed and overpaid, often shutting down suggestions from creatives in meetings. No names are given, but Legarie’s interviewees do comment positively about certain former Bungie higher-ups – former chief technology officer Luis Villegas, former community manager Eric Osborne, and former game director Joe Blackburn.
The video’s sources also reserve some vitriol for Bungie’s human resources team, who are characterised as covering up for the missteps and bad behaviour of leaders. One particular HR person, who has now apparently left, is described as being more concerned about securing the company’s acquisition by Sony in 2022, as part of which they were supposedly due to receive a $5 million payout. Sources also describe having their social media feeds monitored and being warned against promoting themselves as Bungie employees.
According to the video, some or all of those leaders who were difficult to work with have now been shifted to the Marathon reboot, leaving people with much less gamedev experience in charge of Destiny. All this has, according to one source, caused “structural issues that severely undermined the studio’s culture, decision-making, and the final product”. There’s also talk of the studio’s “internal language” growing more corporate, with a distinct shift from talk of “games” and “players” to talk of “companies”, “products” and “customers” during the Sony acquisition.
Among the examples of this corpo thinking is an alleged disagreement over one Destiny set, the Trials Of Osiris PvP armour, which has fixtures that light up when you win consecutive matches and gain reputation. Management were said to be so worried about its enduring appeal that they “almost [blocked] Expanded Trials Accessory glows to protect Eververse sales”. In the abstract, it’s a fun one to consider inasmuch as the Osiris gear is obviously designed with permanence in mind – it’s a wearable ranking system – but that cuts against the logic of a free-to-play shooter that needs you to keep topping up your DLC wardrobe to make money.
Assuming all of this is legitimate reporting, it continues a chaotic month in which Bungie have been caught using an artist’s work without permission in Marathon, a project other anonymous former developers have described as evidence of “good old boy” thinking among Bungie leadership, who have allegedly ignored staff concerns about its shortage of PvE functionality.
I’ll ask Bungie and Sony for comment. All this follows mass layoffs last year amid stagnating returns for Destiny. As part of that restructuring, some former Bungie developers have now formed a new studio at PlayStation who appear to be working on a game about frogs.