Bungie layoffs have me seeing red, man! This whole fuckin year! Companies clear-cutting their workforces in flailing attempts to balance the books, peoples' lives disrupted in incalculable ways on the c-suite's whim. No loyalty, no sustainability, no hope of ever actually building a stable career, a stable life. Fuck this
EDIT WITH MORE THOUGHTS: Maybe this is naive or whatever but it feels like there aren't any rules any more. No structure. It doesn't matter where you work or what you do. There isn't any pathway where you're hired to do a job at a company, you make meaningful & unique contributions in your job for a period of time, your contributions are recognized and rewarded with increased pay and promotions, and over time you become a respected and valuable senior in your field with years of institutional knowledge that you can impart to new passionate hires. That doesn't fucking happen any more! What happens instead is every "senior" hire is some dickhead from a semi-related tech field who just happens to know your boss's boss, while people with actual senior-level skills labor away in obscure junior positions for 4% annual raises (if that). What happens instead is even if you DO manage to hang on and prove yourself valuable enough that you land significant pay increases, you're first to be axed in the next round of layoffs because a limp-dick MBA at head office looked at a spreadsheet and saw that your number was highest. What happens instead is that the only semi-viable pathway to any kind of genuine career advancement comes in the form of a labyrinthine series of lateral job-hops every 2-3 years and most of the time this doesn't even work!! So many peoples' livelihoods depend on the passing fancies of toddler-brained CEOs whose ability to empathize with other humans has long since been excised and replaced with glassy-eyed gambling addictions. Fuck this, fuck them, and most of all fuck studio owners who sell their studios and place the employees who trusted them at the mercy of the gaggle of prep school Patrick Batemans currently gutting this industry
There's something about the firing of fulltime composers like Salvatori and Sechrist that flips me over the edge of "this is tragic but they'll probably keep on trucking" to "oh it's OVER over".
Like, okay, keeping composers as fulltime employees (rather than just contracting as needed) is, by game development standards, a definite luxury. Unless you're lucky enough to have a Toby-Fox-ass workaholic multitasker on staff who can compose in addition to another hard skill, it can be an expense that's difficult to justify. To a parent company middle manager scanning an org chart for cuts, composers probably looks like a no-brainer - the game's got TONS of music already! We'll just bring Salvatori on for a few weeks when we need him and then cut him loose (or, better yet, get someone else to ape his style for half the price)! Nobody will even notice the difference!
Except anyone who's played Destiny - anyone who's played ANY game made by a team that's been lucky enough to have a fulltime composer writing scores from the very beginning - knows that's not true. The difference is night and day. Destiny in particular, its score isn't just a couple Overwatch-ass leitmotifs that get pitch-shifted whenever they need to flavor a new season, it's a rich, living landscape that evolves with the gameplay, is informed by the narrative, all while managing to remain instantly identifiable as Destiny. It's a source of inestimable emotional resonance, as much a beloved character to long-time players as Zavala or Eris Morn. Everyone, I know who plays Destiny has a favorite piece of music - a favorite raid boss theme, a favorite ambient exploration theme, a favorite loading screen theme. And everyone, EVERYONE loves Deep Stone Lullaby. These compositions are indelible from the experience of playing Destiny, an essential part of the thing that keeps pulling players back.
Firing those composers is tantamount to saying "yeah, we aren't going to do that stuff any more. It's not that important, you dumb fucks will keep forking over 200 bucks every 1.5 years for expansions & season passes either way so why not save that money, right?" Pure arrogance, hubris, and self-regarding idiocy. The people who would do this are absolutely not responsible stewards of this studio and are 100% going to pilot it straight into the fucking bedrock.
