The relationship between the formerly autonomous Bungie and Sony is becoming more and more inextricably intertwined. Bungie’s creative leadership team is now moving over to PlayStation Studios itself, as announced by Bridget O’Neill, the former senior director of creative studios at Bungie, now with that same title at…PlayStation Studios.
“Bungie Creative Studios is joining PlayStation to build the foundation for a creative team that can support all PlayStation live service games,” O’Neill posted on Twitter. “This opportunity to share our experience working on Bungie titles with other studios that are building live service games is so exciting. Live service is hard and comes with a unique set of challenges, so together we will be able to give a jumpstart on development for new games.”
This was effectively one of the big reasons Sony bought Bungie in the first place for $3.5 billion, the idea that it could guide its other studios in making effective live service games. This appears to have been going on informally behind the scenes for a while now, where Bungie famously said that the Last of Us Factions game needed more work, ahead of it being cancelled completely, for instance.
Now, Sony wants Bungie to do this more officially, but it’s not just non-Bungie games, as Destiny 2 and Marathon are still included in this umbrella. Sony’s history with live service this year alone has been full of high highs and the lowest possible lows. Helldivers 2 was a surprise megahit for the PlayStation brand (even if it did better on PC), while Concord was one of the most spectacular gaming failures in history, shutting down after just two weeks due to an astonishingly low playercount.
Bungie is no doubt trying to help Sony avoid that situation again (and I do wonder if they might be helping with some sort of free-to-play relaunch of Concord), but there are also many other live games Sony still has in the pipe, as they are not shying away from the concept. Marathon, specifically, is a big game for them, albeit one that is launching on all platforms, including competitor Xbox. Destiny 2 itself will of course continue to exist on all platforms as well.
This represents yet another instance of the blending of Sony and Bungie. This creative team moving, and then another team chopped away to focus on a new live game under SIE directly forming a new studio (allegedly the Codename: Gummy Bears one). And then in the recent round of mass layoffs, many employees were instead moved over to roles at Sony. That takes Bungie down to 850 people working on Destiny and Marathon (before this creative team move), when it used to be well over a thousand.
Bungie has recently laid out a scaled-back plan for Destiny 2 going forward with no more true seasons or episodes and instead two smaller expansions a year in the “Frontiers” era which starts next year. Marathon is undergoing numerous playtests with creators and is supposed to be out in 2025 at some point. Very little information has been publicly shared about the game in over a year now, and effectively none since it got a new game director, again, a year ago.
We’ll see what this new (old?) creative team does at the larger PlayStation command center now. No more Concords, I’m sure, is the going to be emblazoned on the entryway.
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