As Destiny 2 fans mourn the game’s final update, Bungie’s former community manager has said its player count shouldn’t be compared with that of fledgling extraction shooter Marathon — insisting the company’s current issues began long before its arrival, as well as Sony’s acquisition.
Since Marathon debuted in March, and particularly since Bungie announced it was ending development of new Destiny 2 content, fans have continually compared the numbers of players in each game — and scrutinized Marathon’s lower player count in particular.
To many, every time Destiny 2 spiked in popularity, its rising player count was proof that Bungie (and Sony) had acted too soon in ending support. Every fresh ebb for Marathon, meanwhile, served as evidence that the extraction shooter had been a fruitless distraction from Destiny development — which many believe was sacrificed so Bungie could get Marathon out the door.
However, former Bungie community manager Liana Ruppert has now insisted that the company’s problems pre-date Sony ownership — to the extent that its $3.7 billion buyout was an “emergency acquisition.”
“This fight was pre-Sony,” Ruppert wrote, responding to a fan who suggested Sony should have given Destiny 2 more of a chance. “Bungie was below the red line before the Sony acquisition. If it wasn’t acquired right then, the studio was very close to shutting its doors at the very least on Destiny. It was an emergency acquisition.”
With Destiny 2’s final update now in the hands of fans, the majority of Bungie is now solely focused on support for Marathon — though fears of fresh layoffs are also looming. Players, meanwhile, have begun vocally calling on Sony to greenlight a Destiny 3, something that seems unlikely in the current video game development climate — and still years away from launch even if work began today. Regardless, gaming fans have spammed the live chat of numerous recent online showcases, including Sony’s own State of Play, demanding Destiny 3 development begins.
Rather than call for a whole new game right now, however, Ruppert suggested that the best way to ensure Bungie itself survived to make a Destiny 3 someday was to encourage the success of Marathon now — which was never designed to rival Destiny 2’s larger playerbase, while being more straightforward to develop and maintain.
“Half the community is going to hate me for saying this, but the only way to keep Bungie alive right now is to support Marathon,” Ruppert continued. “People keep comparing Marathon numbers to Destiny and frankly, that’s ignorant. Marathon was never designed to do [Destiny 2] numbers. The conversations about that were very upfront early. It’s more aligned with [fellow extraction shooter Escape from] Tarkov than Destiny. Completely different target markets that just so happen to have a wide intersection with Destiny target markets since it uniquely has so many.”
The launch of Destiny 2’s final update saw the game spike at 167,000 concurrent players on Steam, the game’s only platform that publicly displays its player stats. The past couple of days have seen slightly smaller spikes of over 100,000 players, but still triple what the game had been pulling in over recent months.
Marathon, meanwhile, has an all-time Steam player count peak of 77,358 at its launch, though a 24-hour peak of less than 16,000 players — and yes, its numbers are typically a fraction of Destiny 2’s. Of course, this is just a snapshot — many more players will be logging into both games via PlayStation and Xbox, which keep their play concurrents private.
Still, Ruppert claimed that Marathon was “actually performing within expected perimeters. At least from the convos I was there for. Marathon scratches a small but VERY loyal niche. And it’s doing a good job at it. Marathon has a beyond killer team.”
What the future holds for Destiny — and Bungie itself — remains unknown. But despite the fan outcry, there has been no suggestion that the decision to walk away from Destiny 2, quietly made months ago, will be revisited. For now, Bungie remains the developer of Marathon — and maybe one day that will change to include another project. In the meantime, what happens next may rest in fans’ hands.
Tom Phillips is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach Tom at [email protected] or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social
