On the heels of heavy Bungie layoffs, longtime Destiny 2 community manager Dylan "dmg04" Gafner reiterated the responsibility of game studio leadership in a slightly heated discussion of how the industry got to its current state.
This began with a Game Developer opinion piece examining the many pain points in games at the moment, shared by former Square Enix executive Jacob Navok on Twitter. Navok disagreed with much of the piece and instead centered "the market" as a driving factor, from the job market to user appetite, and dismissed dreams of the Western games industry ever returning to previous growth periods.
Former Bungie studio vice president Mark Noseworthy shared, and nodded along with, Navok's take, which brings us up to speed.
"Feels somewhat disingenuous to place blame purely on the market without asking for accountability from leaders who made multiple years of poor decisions too, but nuance is hard to find on Twitter," Gafner replies.
Gafner's take is neutral and targetless, and quite tame compared to ongoing criticism of Bungie's leadership. Since Destiny 2's abrupt end and the studio's ensuing layoffs, former employees have joined players skewering Bungie's approach to just about everything that isn't a skybox or a raid.
Flip-flopping messaging, fruitless investments, baffling and repeated missteps – for all of Destiny 2 and Marathon's greatness, there's no shortage of Bungie mistakes to interrogate, and Gafner's had to play human shield for a lot of those mistakes over the years despite being responsible for exactly none of them.
Noseworthy said he's "going to assume this is not a veiled personal attack," and Gafner later clarified it is not. Rather, Gafner suggests, the topic touched a nerve.
"Been reading so many posts from former colleagues and others throughout the industry that the subject got to me," he says in a reply. "I know you did all you could for the studio and Destiny for years." And to his credit, Noseworthy's era – he was laid off from Bungie in 2024 after being promoted to VP from general manager and, before that, project lead – is pretty fondly remembered.
