It’s a tough time for Bungie and Destiny 2, with parent company Sony saying the studio has failed to meet its sales and user engagement expectations.
In its latest financial report, Sony said it had recorded a 31.5 billion yen (approx. $204.2 million) impairment charge as a result of Destiny 2’s underperformance. That was significant enough to drag down profits at Sony’s Game & Network Services Segment, which includes Sony Interactive Entertainment.
Sony chief financial officer (CFO) Lin Tao, expanded on the issues with Bungie in an investor related financial call:
“Regarding Destiny 2, partially due to the changes in the competitive environment, the level of sales and user engagement have not reached the expectations we had at the time of the acquisition of Bungie. While we will continue to make improvements, we downwardly revised the business projection for the time being, and recorded an impairment loss against a portion of the assets at Bungie.”
It’s certainly been a tough time for Destiny 2 and Bungie, which is working on the delayed extraction shooter Marathon for a release in 2026.
In August, Bungie CEO Pete Parsons left the company after 23 years and nearly 10 as CEO. He was succeeded by Justin Truman, previously chief development officer and fellow Bungie veteran. Parsons oversaw Bungie during many turbulent years, first taking over as CEO in 2016 from Harold Ryan and overseeing its break from Activision in 2019. He was at the helm throughout many of the events catalogued in our 2021 expose of Bungie’s internal work culture. Just months after our report, Bungie was acquired by Sony for $3.7 billion, ending the studio’s flirtation with independence.
Sony, clearly, saw something in Bungie and its upcoming slate. But as the acquisition settled in, concerns began to arise about the studio’s future. Destiny 2 was struggling, and Marathon was still years away. Then the layoffs came. In 2023, Bungie laid off roughly 100 individuals and delayed Destiny 2’s The Final Shape DLC, with Parsons taking responsibility for the cuts. Developers told IGN at the time that the atmosphere at Bungie was “soul-crushing” as fears grew of a total Sony takeover of the company. In 2024, this was followed up with even more layoffs, impacting 220 people despite The Final Shape’s success. 155 people were also integrated from Bungie into Sony at this time. In the wake of those layoffs, former workers claimed Bungie misrepresented its finances and had significantly overextended itself when Sony acquired the studio. It was apparently bad enough that at least one source described as a “well-connected former worker” went so far as to claim that Bungie faced dire consequences if the acquisition hadn’t happened, saying that the “alternate history is insolvency.”
Troubles continued to rock the studio through the rest of 2024 and into 2025, with Marathon seeing a delay out of September of this year to an unknown future date. Most recently, Sony confirmed Bungie would be integrated into PlayStation Studios so the company could have more control over the developer.
Destiny 2 has seen its player count plummet as updates have failed to hit the mark. The action shooter hit a new low on Steam this month, with a peak concurrent player count of 13,497 in the past 24 hours. In June last year it hit 314,000. Recent user reviews for Destiny 2 on Steam are ‘mostly negative,’ although overall reviews are ‘mostly positive.’ Steam does not paint the entire picture when it comes to Destiny 2’s popularity, with it widely available across multiple platforms, but clearly Sony isn’t happy with how the studio has performed in the three years since it brought it into the fold.
Back in June, Sony said it remained committed to live service video games despite high-profile failures such as Concord, and insisted Marathon would be out before April 2026 despite the mixed alpha feedback and damaging accusations of plagiarism against Bungie.
Sony will be keen to avoid another catastrophic launch like Concord, which was pulled offline just two weeks after launch, with one estimate suggesting it sold just 25,000 copies. It has proved a costly failure for Sony, with hundreds of millions of dollars wasted amid the closure of its developer, Firewalk Studios. Bungie now faces concern over its own future, with the pressure on Marathon to deliver.
Photo by FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP via Getty Images.
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at [email protected].
