Bungie has reportedly canned it’s ‘Destiny’ spin-off ‘Project Payback’.
Bungie has reportedly canned it’s Destiny spin-off Project Payback
Following the major lay-offs at the company - which saw 220 employees lose their jobs and a further 230 join Sony or a different studio - industry insider Jeff Grubb has now claimed Bungie has scrapped it’s upcoming title set in the ‘Destiny’ universe, and let go of its two senior executives Luke Smith and Mark Noseworthy as a part of the developer’s mass redundancy programme.
Speaking on his ‘Game Mess Decides’ podcast, Grubb said: “[Smith and Noseworthy] were labelled as working on ‘Payback’. It was going to be the next big thing for ‘Destiny’, but not ‘Destiny 3’.
“Luke Smith and Mark Noseworthy are no longer at Bungie. They were let go. They were caught in the executive and leadership shakeup mentioned in the blogpost. ‘Payback’ has been shelved.”
A separate report from Gamespot’s Tamoor Hussain corroborated the story, and said the restructuring at Bungie meant ‘Payback’ “had no path forward”.
However, Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier claimed the recent lay-offs had nothing to do with the title’s cancellation, and said ‘Payback’ had been shelved “a while ago”.
In a post to X, the industry insider wrote: “‘Destiny 3’ was not canceled because it was never in development, per people familiar. Bungie did some very early work on a spin-off project called ‘Payback’, but they canceled that a while ago.”