I believe it's peer pressure once you have that kind of money. They are so far from reality they just don't think about it. All their cocaine-buddies ramble about how they "deserve it" to throw money out of the window, they worked so hard yadda-yadda.

It's bonkers. But I also never had that kind of money. Maybe we would all do the same thing?

So incredibly wasteful and vain.

Probably significantly fewer. Here in the UK someone's salary is about half of what it costs a business to employ them. It might be more than that in the USA but there will be other non-salary costs per employee.

FWIW that is not the average salary in the tech industry.

The morale nosedive that layoffs bring means the loss of company productivity is so much higher than just who you let go. They have to be the absolute last resort. Pete Parsons has to go.

You might wish to just ask her in passing, "hey, I heard what's going on at Bungie, is everything okay?" Whether she does or doesn't still have a job, she is probably stressed as hell and could probably use some kind words.

So instead of spending money on extravagant expenses they could have fired 5% less people this round.... Compared to what the money is spent on that still sounds good.

Though it indeed makes little difference in the big picture, this is still a bad image.

That still doesn't justify paying one person so much that his budget for shoving old cars in a garage is the pay for ten people who actually work

It just seems like it's dug it's own grave so effectively that there's no way to climb out.

In theory I love their aim of player retention, but they focused on it so exclusively that it became a challenge to start playing, or to come back. The new player experience isn't just bad or non-existent, it's basically actively hostile. Most of the story content isn't accessible anymore, so you're depending on dozens of hours of Youtube videos to catch up on a decade of in-jokes that you can't experience. It's like Eve, but worse because it was written, not just player interaction lore. Even as someone who played D1 and the first few years of D2, looking at current screenshots and trailers is alienating. They've revamped and juggled currencies and what power levels are so much that basically nothing is the same.

The pivot to seasons/microtransactions while ignoring recruitment of new players was a wild choice.

Destiny was supposed to be their “forever” game, the problem is that after 2 dozen expansions:

1. New players are extremely intimidated about joining
2. Old players dislike losing the content they’ve paid for when it’s vaulted
3. Long term players will eventually get bored of playing the same thing they’ve been playing for years

Live service games just won’t last forever like they want them to.

Looks like Sony only bought them in 2022 source