A new report by Bloomberg paints a distressing picture for the Destiny studio.

On Monday, October 30th, Bungie laid off an undisclosed number of employees. Earlier in the day on October 31st, we learned that Bungie laid off Michael Salvatori, the legendary composer that created music for several Halo games and the Destiny franchise. Now, a new report from Bloomberg sheds some additional light on just how dire things seem to be at Bungie.

Bloomberg's report says that there were an estimated 100 employees laid off from Bungie on Monday. The studio had employed roughly 1,200 people, meaning that bout 8% of its entire workforce was laid off this week. These layoffs come in the same month that management warned of "a sharp drop in the popularity of its flagship video game Destiny 2."

Allegedly, two weeks ago, Bungie executives held a meeting with employees where they explained that revenues were running a staggering 45% below projections for the year. This is according to information provided to Bloomberg from people who were in attendance at the meeting. Bungie CEO Pete Parsons said that a big reason for the poor performance is due to weak player retention for Destiny 2. The game has been dealing with declining player numbers and a poor reception since the release of the Lightfall expansion in February 2023.

The report from Bloomberg continues on to say that Destiny 2's next expansion, The Final Shape, was only getting good but not great feedback. This pushed management to delay the release of The Final Shape from February 2024 into June 2024. These added months are meant to give developers more time to improve the expansion ahead of release.

In that meeting two weeks ago, Parsons also told Bungie staff that there would be cost-cutting measures taken. This included putting a freeze on implementing new salary and hiring new employees. Amounts given for travel were also cut.

Then came the news on Monday that an estimated 100 employees were laid off from Bungie.

Those that were let go will receive at least three months of severance and three months of health insurance. As we learned previously, other benefits such as expense reimbursements, ended on Monday. Prorated bonuses will be given to those that were laid off from Bungie. However, those that were set to receive shares following Sony's acquisition of Bungie will lose all shares not vested as of next month.

Bloomberg says that many of the layoffs at Bungie were from the company's support department. This includes areas of community management and publishing. Those still employed at Bungie were told that some of those newly vacant positions within the support department will be outsourced moving forward.

This all comes during a year in which major shakeups have been occurring within the gaming and tech industries. It also comes at a time where several PlayStation studios are rumored to be against the push for more games as a service (GaaS) releases. PlayStation wanted to make a big GaaS push across all of its studios, at least up until recently.

The most recent rumor suggests that Sony is reversing course on their push for GaaS titles. Sony has reportedly enlisted the help of Sega and Bandai Namco to help them "catch up" on steering some IPs away from the GaaS model. Shortly after acquiring Bungie, Sony took Bungie employees to various PlayStation studios to offer feedback on their GaaS experiences. It has been long rumored that the in-development multiplayer experience set in The Last of Us universe was cancelled due to negative feedback from those Bungie visits.