Bungie Just Killed Destiny for a Game Nobody Wanted

$3.6 billion. A dead franchise. A game on life support. And more layoffs on the way.

I wish I didn't have to write this one.

Destiny 2's final content update drops June 9. Active development is over. Bungie confirmed it in a blog post yesterday, framing it as "a new beginning" while announcing the end of one of the most successful online shooters ever made. The game will stay online. You can still log in. But nothing new is coming. No expansions. No seasons. No road map. Just a final Moments of Triumph event and the return of Sparrow Racing as a permanent mode. A love letter wrapped in a eulogy.

And THEN Bloomberg dropped the other shoe. Jason Schreier reported that Bungie is planning significant layoffs. Destiny 3 is not in production. It hasn't been greenlit. It isn't even in pre-production. Staff are pitching new ideas, including potential Destiny projects, but nothing has been approved. Bungie reportedly can't afford to make Destiny 3. The developers who aren't laid off will be shifted to Marathon.

Marathon. The extraction shooter that I thought may find it's footing based on a timely release (Believe me i know i should be made fun of for that call). Became the game that peaked and immediately started bleeding players. The game currently sitting at around 12,000 concurrent players on Steam, a number Bungie has publicly called a "strong core playerbase." That's where the Destiny team is going.

This is just sad, man.

The Fans Called It

Destiny players have been sounding the alarm on this for over a year. The minute Marathon was revealed, the community started asking the question nobody at Bungie wanted to answer. Is this what Destiny is dying for?

And it looks like the answer is yes.

After The Final Shape shipped in 2024, Bungie scaled back content significantly. Smaller drops. Longer gaps between updates. Player counts hit record lows. The pipeline that used to deliver consistent seasonal content dried up. And all the while, resources were being funneled into Marathon, a game that the Destiny audience didn't ask for and largely didn't want.

Bellular did a fantastic breakdown of this just days ago, walking through the timeline of how Bungie's priorities shifted away from Destiny and toward a genre they had no business chasing. I'd recommend watching it if you want the full picture. The short version is that everything the community feared was happening was in fact happening. The studio that built one of the most dedicated fan bases in gaming walked away from them.

And now those fans are watching the franchise get put in the ground while the studio pivots to a game that cost over $250 million to make and can barely hold 10,000 players.

Sony Bought a Ghost

Let's talk about the money for a second because the numbers here are staggering.

Sony bought Bungie in 2022 for $3.6 billion. The acquisition was supposed to give Sony live service expertise. Bungie was going to be the engine that powered Sony's push into the live service market. That was the whole pitch.

Three years later, Sony has reported a $560 million impairment loss on Bungie. That means Sony has officially written off over half a billion dollars in value from the acquisition. The studio's flagship franchise is ending. Their only other game is underperforming. And more layoffs are coming on top of the ones that have already gutted the studio over the past two years.

Sony paid $3.6 billion for live service help. What they got was a studio that killed its own golden goose and shipped an extraction shooter that nobody wanted. Now that studio is bleeding talent while trying to figure out what to do next. I wrote about this in the Sony piece earlier this week. Sony is optimizing the machine while having nothing to offer the people who are supposed to buy into it. Bungie is the living proof of that strategy's failure.

And for the Destiny fans this hits different. These aren't just numbers on a spreadsheet. This is a community that spent years building raid groups, grinding for god rolls, arguing about class balance, living inside this world. Thousands of hours for millions of players. And the developers who built those experiences, the artists and engineers and designers who poured themselves into making Destiny what it was, are the ones getting walked out the door.

That's the part that I don't think people talk about enough. Studios don't just shut down franchises. They scatter the people who made them. And once those teams break apart, that institutional knowledge, that shared creative language, the chemistry that made Destiny feel like Destiny, it's gone. You don't rebuild that. You can't reassemble it in a different office under a different project. It just evaporates.

The Live Service Graveyard Gets Another Headstone

I keep a running list in my head of studios that abandoned what made them successful to chase live service trends. Bioware with Anthem. Rocksteady with Suicide Squad. Arcane with Redfall. Crystal Dynamics with Marvel's Avengers. Each one followed the same pattern. A beloved studio with a proven track record walks away from what they're good at, chases somebody else's success, burns through their credibility, and ends up worse than where they started.

Bungie is the most painful addition to that list because Destiny was already a live service game. It was one of the most successful ones ever made. They didn't need to reinvent the wheel. They just needed to keep doing what they were doing. Instead, they looked at the extraction shooter market, a genre with a hard ceiling that barely sustains the games already in it, and decided that was their future.

Marathon reportedly cost over $250 million to make. It launched to middling commercial performance. The player base has cratered. And now Bungie is adding PvE content to try to stop the bleeding, which is ironic considering they abandoned a PvE franchise to make this game in the first place.

You know what would have been a safer bet than a $250 million extraction shooter? Destiny 3. A game that already had an audience. A community that was begging for it. A franchise with proven commercial legs that had sold billions of dollars worth of content over a decade.

But somebody somewhere decided that wasn't the play. Somebody at the top looked at what Bungie had built and said no, we need to chase a trend. And now here we are.

What Halo's Studio Became

I keep coming back to this thought. This is the studio that made Halo. That's where Bungie started. They defined an entire generation of console gaming. They gave Xbox its identity. They created one of the most iconic franchises in the history of the medium. Then they left Microsoft because they wanted creative freedom. They wanted to do something new. And they did. Destiny, whatever you think of it, was something new. It was ambitious. It had a vision.

But somewhere along the way, the vision stopped being about making games they believed in and started being about making games they thought would make money. That shift is always where it starts to fall apart. It happened at Bioware. It happened at Blizzard. And now it's happened at Bungie. Once upon a time they were the studio that told Microsoft they were leaving to chase their dream. Now they're the studio that killed their own dream to chase somebody else's trend.

And the people who are paying the price aren't the executives who made these calls. It's the developers. The ones who stayed loyal through the Activision split. Who stuck around through the Sony acquisition. Who kept making content for Destiny while watching their friends get laid off around them. Those are the people who are about to lose their jobs so that Bungie can keep propping up a game that 10,000 people play.

Where It Goes From Here

Bungie says they're "incubating new projects." Staff are pitching ideas. Some of those pitches reportedly include Destiny concepts. But nothing has been greenlit. And in this market, with Sony tightening budgets and raising prices across the board, there is no guarantee any of them ever will be.

Marathon will continue. Bungie has committed to that. They're adding PvE modes, new maps, quality of life updates. Whether any of that is enough to turn a struggling extraction shooter into the live service hit Sony paid $3.6 billion for is another question entirely. Based on everything I've seen and everything I played during the alpha, I don't think it will be.

And Destiny 2 will stay online. You can still log in. You can still run raids with your friends. You can still patrol the Cosmodrome and pretend like nothing changed. But something did change. The people who made it what it was are leaving. The content pipeline is dry. And the future that fans hoped for, a Destiny 3 that could take the franchise forward with everything they learned, doesn't exist.

When you forget about the players, they forget about you. But in this case, the players never forgot about Bungie. Bungie forgot about them.

This one stings. Not because a game is ending. Games end. But because it didn't have to end like this. There was a world where Bungie listened to their audience and invested in Destiny's future. Where they built something that lasted another decade. Instead they chased a trend and burned through their goodwill. And now the people who cared the most about what they made are the ones left standing in the wreckage.

I don't like any of this.