Two months before this week's mass layoff of more than 200 staff at Bungie, "Payback," the codename for a third-person perspective spinoff project set in the Destiny universe, was cancelled in order to prioritize development of the upcoming Marathon extraction shooter, according to a report from Bloomberg's Jason Schreier.
According to the blog post from Bungie CEO Pete Parsons that announced the layoffs—which was apparently how some staff got the news—the studio's second major downsizing in less than a year is the result of an "overly ambitious" management decision to initiate "several incubation projects," which left Bungie's development staff spread "too thin, too quickly." One of those projects was Payback, a Destiny spinoff that Schreier's sources said would "shake up the formula in major ways."
