As fans sift through the ashes following Bungie’s announcement that Destiny 2 is ending active development, former Bungie writer Robert Brookes summarizes a sentiment percolating in the game’s community: “It turns out the real Destiny killer was Pete Parsons.”
Brookes was laid off from Bungie in July 2024 – one of hundreds of employees impacted as the studio made multiple deep cuts. Previously, he wrote at the time, he’d been “delivering seasonal story from Hunt all the way to Deep and sending home the most well-received expansion in our history in Final Shape.”
Reacting to today’s development shutdown, Brookes minces no words on Parsons. The CEO departed Bungie last year following the aforementioned layoffs and during a fraught time for the company, passing the role of studio head to Justin Truman.
Parsons previously championed plans to turn Bungie into a multi-franchise studio positioned as “one of the world’s best entertainment companies,” though that plan was pitched at a much rosier time for Bungie.
As Bungie declined over the past few years, current leaders, former leaders, and especially Parsons faced mounting criticism – not just for how the studio’s incubation projects and layoffs had been handled (disastrously, mostly), but also for the golden parachutes they rode out of the company following the Sony acquisition. Brookes touches on this in a separate Bluesky post today: “Don’t worry they’re suffering in their *checks note on hand* multi-million dollar payouts.”
Even before his departure, Parsons was skewered for spending millions of dollars on vintage cars while developers were being laid off.
Statements from Parsons drew fire as well. Fans and developers grilled his remarks on the October 2023 layoffs, calling them tone-deaf. In 2021, Parsons apologized for Bungie’s work culture following an IGN report alleging toxic and sexist behavior had been tolerated by leadership.
Yet in some ways, Parsons is just a stand-in for Bungie leadership writ large. As one hot Reddit post argues today: “As everyone knows, Bungie has terrible executives (maybe even some are still there) but the devs who do the actual work to make the game deserve a round of applause.”
With Destiny 2 on the way out, players are trading memories, grasping at straws, and enjoying some gallows humor. Destiny 3, the unannounced sequel long held up as a necessary, clean-slate solution to all of Destiny 2’s problems, is unsurprisingly the talk of the town. Bungie suggested there’s more Destiny to come as it dropped the axe on Destiny 2 – “Once we have more news to share on Destiny, you’ll be the first to know,” it says – but didn’t commit to specific projects.
Another game dev, communications director Thomas Puha of Remedy, summarizes the response well. “No. Just no,” he says. “I’ve got 5000 hours in this game, lifelong friends from it, some enemies, and at Bungie so many friends over the years. This hurts, at least the game being quiet this year has enabled me to work day and night on Control Resonant, but…I’m literally in tears that the journey is over. I love this game like no other.”
Sony reports $765 million impairment loss on Marathon and Destiny 2 studio Bungie for the last financial year, after paying $3.6 billion for it in 2022.
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