Since the halcyon days of playing Afterburner in the arcade during summer holidays and the Vic20 Santa got for me for Christmas 1982, I’ve been a gamer.
I’ve had countless hours of fun with each generation of PlayStation console, from drunken Tekken nights as a teenager to the wonder of Final Fantasy 7 to the emotion of The Last of Us, but the game that’s taken my attention for an entire decade is Destiny 2.
A Decade of Destiny
D2 is one of those games that just keeps pulling you back for more. It’s fun as heck, keeps on evolving and I’ve made real-world friends from playing it to the point where I’m off to one of their weddings next week.
Produced by a studio called Bungie, famed creator of the Halo franchise, it’s been an epic, sprawling experience that’s plays unlike anything else out there.
But Bungie are facing some huge problems.
Last October, Bungie CEO Pete Parsons told staff that the company had missed its revenue targets by 45% and was losing money, and proceeded to lay off some 100 staff.
Then on July 31st, Parsons announced a further 220 employees had been let go, plus an additional 155 people who would be shifted over to their parent company, Sony Interactive Entertainment.
The gaming industry has been shedding employees in large numbers since the end of the pandemic, but Bungie’s situation hits a little different.
No smoke without fire…
There’s been years-long criticism of senior leadership at Bungie almost to the point of it becoming a meme, but the judgement of those at the top has now been brought into laser-sharp focus.
Journalist Jason Shreier spoke with numerous current and former employees and found widespread condemnation for Parsons, saying “he had failed to take accountability for his own bad bets”.
Parsons himself acknowledges the mistakes from leadership in the blog post announcing the layoffs. “We were overly ambitious, our financial safety margins were subsequently exceeded, and we began running in the red,” he wrote, but stopped short of taking accountability for any of the decision-making.
Current and former employees, some of whom only found out about the lay-offs after the public post went live, have since weighed in with withering criticism.
Journo Paul Tassi spoke with many of them, and found that “everyone does not trust leadership at all but leadership does not really seem to understand that, and some actually believe this week and this situation went well.”
Not a good look…
It’s astonishing that leadership can be so utterly blind (or in denial) about the mood/state of their staff, as well as the enormous fire that’s raging in the gaming press and community.
The overwhelming view is that the senior leadership are cashing in on their pay-outs and shares from the sale of the studio to Sony in 2022 for $3.6billion, while the talented people actually delivering the work are being cut to cover their bad calls.
Then there’s Parsons’ purchase history of 17 collector-quality cars (at a combined cost of $2.3 million) over the last 2 years, with reports of casual invitations to staff members to “come and look at my cars” just days before the lay-offs.
And the fact that immediately after issuing the public statement about the losses, Parsons made his Twitter account private.
What a leader shouldn’t do…
So off the top of my noggin, here are specific behaviours that anyone purporting to be a leader should not do.
artificially inflate the price of your company to profit personally
treat your employees as expendable resources while still expecting them to crunch out incredibly high quality work
ignore the collapsing mood of employees as a direct result of your decisions
maintain the delusion that’s everything’s peachy when peoples livelihoods are ripped from under them
deny all accountability for years-long poor decision making that only came from the very top
And that’s just for starters.
Look, I’ve never met Mr Parsons or anyone else at the top of Bungie.
But I’ve sure met people like them.
Leaders, listen up
Leadership is a privilege.
It’s not a cash-cow, it’s not a silo, it’s not an ivory tower.
And while there are many types of leader and many qualities that make a leader great, the two mandatories are integrity and accountability.
Leaders who don’t demonstrate those qualities need to do the inner work to adjust their behaviour.
And those who work into a leader who doesn’t demonstrate those qualities don’t need to normalise it or tolerate it.
We should be past this already.
