Bungie has reportedly laid off a large portion of its in-house cinematics and video production staff, with multiple affected employees posting layoff notices on LinkedIn. The cuts are said to include people who worked on Destiny cutscenes, trailers, and other video content, though Bungie hasn’t confirmed the full scale of the round.
The affected staff appear to cover trailer production, in-game cinematics, editing, and broader video marketing work. Some of those impacted had reportedly transferred from Bungie to Sony Interactive Entertainment in an earlier reshuffle but remained tied to Bungie’s production pipeline.
Bungie’s cinematic output has long been one of the studio’s strongest selling points. From the opening of Lightfall to the reveal trailers for The Witch Queen and The Final Shape, those sequences have carried a lot of Destiny 2‘s marketing weight. Some of the bigger pre-rendered showpieces have historically involved external partners like Axis Studios and The Mill, but a substantial chunk of Destiny‘s cutscene and video work was handled internally.
More cuts in a long year for Bungie
This wouldn’t be Bungie’s first round of layoffs. The studio cut around 100 staff in late 2023, then announced a major restructuring in July 2024 that eliminated roughly 220 roles, about 17% of the company, while folding another 155 positions into Sony. A separate incubation project was spun out into a new PlayStation Studios team.
Sony bought Bungie in 2022 for around $3.6bn, pitching the studio as a key piece of its live-service strategy. Since then, rising development costs, a rocky Destiny 2 expansion cycle, and uncertainty around Marathon have pushed Bungie into a much smaller operational footprint.
It’s not yet clear how the latest cuts will affect Marathon, Bungie’s extraction shooter. Some of its cinematic work has reportedly been handled by outside contractors, separate from the Destiny team. Future Bungie trailers and cutscenes could lean more heavily on external vendors, gameplay-driven edits, or rehiring former staff as contractors, a pattern that has become common across the industry.
