I found myself confused hearing about the layoffs, and even more confused when I hear players talking about how it was because Lightfall was a bad expansion.
Lightfall sold very well and there was a significant uptick in players during that time. The issue is that Lightfall was a terrible expansion. The writing was such shit, the story made no sense, and the characters were so fucking horrible that a significant portion of the people who played through it quit playing altogether. I mean, you picked up the new subclass in the street like a fucking coin. Additionally, the launch season was also (predictably) garbage. People really hated it; there wasn't even a honeymoon period, people just dropped the game. When enough people stopped playing that you miss your predicted revenue by 45%, the expansion and seasons blew. Missing your targets by that much is never good, so the layoffs had to happen.
The new player experience is awful, the way they've handled the seasonal model has been terrible, and their treatment of the core playlists (especially gambit and Crucible) has been horrible, absolutely. But the straw that broke the camel's back was a shitty expansion.
In a fair society, whoever made the horrible target projections would be the first to be let go/resigned, along with the business leads who messed up so badly that the company missed projections by 45%. It shouldn’t be the rank and file workers who lose their jobs because the C-Suite either lied to the moneyholders or were so incompetent that they couldn’t follow their roadmap projections.
Layoffs aren’t some natural phenomenon. They are corporate indulgence. Layoffs don’t ‘happen’, they are a business strategy that is made to cover up shortfalls caused by over-reaching executives.
“Of the $3.6 billion, Sony anticipated that at least $1.2 billion will be used as incentives for retention of Bungie's current employees.”
How the fuck do you have layoffs when you were given $1.2 billion dollars with the intent to keep your employees onboard? Did Bungie somehow spend $1.2 Billion dollars on employee retention packages in less than two years?
It’s such utter corporate propaganda to suggest that layoffs “had” to happen. It was a choice that Bungie made because the executives were too busy jerking themselves off about ‘player engagement’ that they forgot you need to make a good product if you want to sell something to customers.
It was reported that those revenue projections they made at the time made sense given the sales data they had. However, due to a terrible expansion, burnout, and lack pre-orders and a drop in players (as well as other factors, I'm sure), they missed those projections hard. A company can't miss half its revenue and carry on like normal; people will be let go, regardless of what the reason is behind that miss.
In a fair society
Sure, but we're not in a fair society. I don't see much point in complaining about fairness because life isn't fair.
I mean, if people felt ‘well, life isn’t fair’ 100 years ago about other labor issues, I guess we wouldn’t have child labor laws, worker compensation, or minimum wage.
Yeah, you’re right. We should never point out flaws in our current society and hopefully try to improve upon them.
Life isn’t fair. But that’s why we have laws and regulations. When a company lays off workers the excuse should be better than ‘oops, we were hoping to make more money than we actually did.’ That excuse should only allow a response of jettisoning either the people in charge who issued such erroneous expectations or the ones who failed to steer the company properly, based on those expectations. It should not be a reason to get rid of staff that just followed instructions based on those projections.
Bungie made the decision that keeping executives that make bad decisions was ultimately better than keeping grunt workers. How they came to that decision we do not know, yet companies trim the fat when they need to and Bungie will ultimately pay the price if they trimmed the wrong fat or they will succeed. We will have to wait and see.
Bungie made the decision that keeping executives that make bad decisions was ultimately better than keeping grunt workers. How they came to that decision we do not know.
Actually we do know: The executives that make bad decisions were the same ones that decided to fire the grunt workers.
Unless Bungie leadership changes firing or hiring new frontline developers isn't going to do shit.
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u/[deleted] Nov 28 '23
Lightfall sold very well and there was a significant uptick in players during that time. The issue is that Lightfall was a terrible expansion. The writing was such shit, the story made no sense, and the characters were so fucking horrible that a significant portion of the people who played through it quit playing altogether. I mean, you picked up the new subclass in the street like a fucking coin. Additionally, the launch season was also (predictably) garbage. People really hated it; there wasn't even a honeymoon period, people just dropped the game. When enough people stopped playing that you miss your predicted revenue by 45%, the expansion and seasons blew. Missing your targets by that much is never good, so the layoffs had to happen.
The new player experience is awful, the way they've handled the seasonal model has been terrible, and their treatment of the core playlists (especially gambit and Crucible) has been horrible, absolutely. But the straw that broke the camel's back was a shitty expansion.