This thinking is exactly why they are in as much shit as they are. They couldnt fund the development of 3 AAA games at once.
No, their issue was that they were spending more money than the one they were generating.
They shouldn't have hired the several hundred people they hired since the acquisition, they grew from 826 in January 2022 to around 1300 people (plus around 100 fired last year) a few days ago. Slide from
May 2022:
They also started more projects that they could fund with current Destiny 2 revenue and had to reduce the amount of money being put on Destiny 2.
So to bring back them to profitability had to shut down some projects, fire many people or move them somewhere else and to reduce the size of the ongoing Destiny 2 content, as they did.
Totoki and Hermen are putting some order there that's all. Bungie maybe continue in the red (or maybe not, what they did could be enough to keep them profitable) but starting with the Marathon release they'll be fine financially.
What makes you think they can do more with less?
Knowing the size of many AAA games, which can be double checked in the game credits shown in places like Moby Games.
Most AAA teams release their games with a lead dev team of around 100-250 people, the rest are from support / outsourcing teams, which provide the main bulk of the team, and then there's a smaller part of publisher side.
During most of the production the dev team is smaller, and specially after launch in case of GaaS because don't do the big ass yearly expansions.
It's even way smaller the team you need to prototype/incubate/preproduce new ideas: less than a dozen people. Maybe a few dozen people to work on multiple projects.
850 people is way more than they what they need for Destiny 2, Marathon, a team prototyping/incubating a few games plus maybe another unannounced game (pretty likely Destiny based, since Destiny is their money cow and they mentioned that will focus on Destiny and Marathon) under development.
