"Keep yourself sharp if you think you want to come back, and there's no shame in just leaving. The company will never love you back, but if you let it, it'll kill you."
Former Bungie chief legal officer Don McGowan spent the last few years attracting attention for high-profile lawsuits against Destiny 2 cheatmakers and players that targeted the studio with harassment. Despite breaking ground on how studios can protect their games and employees, McGowan and many of his legal colleagues were among the approximately 100 employees laid off by the studio in October 2023.
That's an unusual development in an era where the video game industry is shedding thousands of jobs. In an interview with Game Developer McGowan noted he's the kind of executive companies retain in times like this given the legal resources that are needed to process such large cuts. But Bungie still has access to a robust legal team—the one employed by parent company Sony. Now McGowan is in the wind. He's continuing to teach entertainment law at the Seattle Film Institute and entering his "super villain era" according to his profile on BlueSky.
Not many supervillains share McGowan's fervor for a cause growing in popularity among game developers: unionization and labor organizing. He comes at the movement from an unusual starting point: the C-suite. He quipped that usually he's the one companies turn to deter unions, not enable them.
After enduring the brutal Bungie cuts and watching the industry brace for more job losses, McGowan is adamant: the game industry needs to unionize.
Read our full interview with McGowan over at Game Developer.
