Sony is putting together a Bungie team for the role of live services overseer at PlayStation

The relationship between the formerly autonomous Bungie and Sony is becoming increasingly inextricably intertwined. Bungie’s creative leadership team is now moving to PlayStation Studios itself, as Bridget O’Neill, the former senior director of creative studios at Bungie, now with the same title at… PlayStation Studios, has announced.

“Bungie Creative Studios is joining PlayStation to lay the foundation for a creative team capable of supporting all PlayStation Live Service games,” O’Neill wrote on Twitter. “This opportunity to share our experiences working on Bungie titles with other studios developing live service games is so exciting. The live service is difficult and presents a unique set of challenges, so together we will be able to advance the development of new games.”

This was actually one of the main reasons why Sony bought Bungie for $3.5 billion in the first place, with the idea that it could help its other studios develop effective live service games. This seems to have been happening unofficially behind the scenes for some time, with Bungie saying, for example, that the Last of Us Factions game needed more work before it was canceled completely.

Now Sony wants Bungie to make this more official, but that’s not the case not-Bungie games like Destiny 2 and Marathon are still included under this umbrella. Sony’s history with live services has been full of ups and downs this year alone. Helldivers 2 was a surprise megahit for the PlayStation brand (even if it performed better on PC), while Concord was one of the most spectacular gaming failures in history, being canceled after just two weeks due to a staggeringly low player count.

Bungie is undoubtedly trying to help Sony avoid this situation again (and I wonder if they might be helping with some kind of free-to-play relaunch of Concord), but there are also plenty of other live games that Sony still has has in the pipeline because they don’t shy away from the concept. Marathon in particular is a big game for them, albeit one that releases on all platforms, including rival Xbox. Destiny 2 itself will of course continue to exist on all platforms.

This is another example of Sony and Bungie merging. That creative team moved, and then another team split off to focus on a new live game under SIE and directly form a new studio (supposedly codenamed: Gummy Bears). And then in the most recent round of mass layoffs, many employees were moved to positions at Sony instead. This brings Bungie down to 850 people working on Destiny and Marathon (prior to this creative team change), compared to well over a thousand previously.

Bungie recently laid out a scaled-back plan for Destiny 2’s future, which includes no more real seasons or episodes and instead calls for two smaller expansions per year in the “Frontiers” era that begins next year. Marathon is undergoing numerous playtests with the developers and is scheduled to be released sometime in 2025. Very little information about the game has been shared publicly for over a year, and virtually none since it got another new game director a year ago.

We’ll see what this new (old?) creative team does now in the larger PlayStation command center. I’m sure “No more Concords” will be emblazoned at the entrance.

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