Luke Smith and Mark Noseworthy are no longer working on Destiny, either

Bungie is straight-up not having a good time as of late. Again. This time, though, we’re looking at one of the biggest crises the company’s ever had, as it continues to lay off some of its most valuable talent, even after Destiny 2: The Final Shape ended up being way better than expected.

More specifically, Bungie recently announced that it’s losing about a third of its staff. Some of these folks are being rolled over into Sony, while others outright lost their jobs, but the really surprising bit is how many veteran developers have been booted from the studio. According to the latest developments in a Gamespot report, senior executives Luke Smith and Mark Noseworthy have also been affected by these layoffs, which comes as a pretty big surprise.

Bungie has lost too much valuable talent at this point

Smith and Noseworthy have been with Bungie and Destiny, specifically, for a very long time now. Smith was, in fact, one of the people responsible for the widely unpopular round of sunsetting brought about with the release of the Beyond Light DLC. Regardless, he was a known quantity in the Destiny community, and spearheaded much of the franchise’s development in the years prior alongside Noseworthy. In October 2023, Bungie also booted the legendary Michael Salvatori from the development team, who was responsible for almost all of Destiny 2‘s iconic soundtrack.

These are just three veteran developers of the literally hundreds of talented staff that Bungie has lost over the past couple of months. It’s hard to say whether this might lead to a breaking point of some sort this early on, but it’s certainly not unthinkable to imagine that even Bungie’s current flagship projects (i.e. Destiny 2 and Marathon) might suffer such an immense brain drain. New content is still pouring into Destiny 2, of course, but who knows what the future might hold for it.

Now, it’s very important to note that Smith and Noseworthy had been spearheading the mysterious Payback project in the background. Following the latest Bungie restructuring, according to Jeff Grubb, Smith and Noseworthy had no path forward in Bungie as Payback had been shelved. While we don’t have any hard info on the nature of Payback at this time, word is that it was supposed to be a standalone-ish Destiny game, although decidedly not a full-on sequel to Destiny 2.

Circling back to the big question I can’t help but pose: it’s virtually impossible that Bungie hasn’t lost some crucial talent in its latest lever-pulling round of layoffs. We have no way of knowing how this might affect its ongoing projects, and what the future holds for both Destiny and Marathon. The only thing we do know is that there’s a whole lot of people who are now out of jobs, and it’s an absolute certainty that many of them were crucial for Destiny 2 in its current state.