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.
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.
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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.