Destiny 2 is About to Die, the Community Challenges Bungie and Sony to Create Destiny 3
I’ve been playing since the beta of the first Destiny in 2014. I still remember the first time the Traveler appeared before me, that huge white sphere suspended above the Last City, and the distinct feeling that inside it was a world worth getting lost in. I was there in vanilla Destiny 2 when the community rose up against microtransactions, and I've been there for twelve years, expansion after expansion, raid after raid, season after season. I've lost count of the nights spent taking down a boss with five friends scattered across half of Europe. That’s why writing these lines is so hard for me: tomorrow, June 9, 2026, at 7 PM, that world is shutting its doors. And it’s not doing so in the way it deserved.
Monument of Triumph is the last content update in the history of Destiny. It's signed by Bungie, which after this day will not add anything new: no more seasons, no more expansions, no more raids. The game will remain online, in a sort of maintenance mode like the first Destiny, but it effectively stops living. And yes, the irony is fierce: the farewell update finally brings back the Sparrow Racing League online, new abilities, new armor, and many other things the community has been asking for years. Almost nine years after launch, the game still shows enormous potential. Just when they are turning it off.
What is a Live Service, and why stopping updates means killing it
For those not familiar with the genre: a live service is a game that never really ends. You don’t buy it, finish it, and put it on the shelf. You live it. Every week there’s something new, every season a story that progresses, every year an expansion that upends the balance. Destiny 2 has been the manifesto of this model, the game that transformed the looter-shooter into a mass phenomenon: you shoot, collect increasingly powerful loot, and shoot again. A hypnotic cycle that has kept millions of players glued for a decade.
That’s why stopping updates isn’t a break: it’s a death sentence. A single-player game sits there, unchanged, forever. A live service without new content is a body that no longer breathes: the world is still there, but life has already abandoned it. And with it goes one of the most ambitious and engaging narrative sagas ever written in a video game, that of Light and Dark, which closed just two years ago with The Final Shape and was never truly rewarded for all it built.
The community is not having it: petition, chat floods, and the June 9 assault
The players' reaction was immediate and furious. A petition on Change.org asking Sony and Bungie for the green light for Destiny 3 surpassed 40,000 signatures in less than a day, 200,000 in three days, and broke through the 300,000 mark in just a few weeks. At the time of the State of Play on June 2, it was already over 338,000, and as I write, it has reached 364,480.
That State of Play became a battlefield. The official chat during the live stream was literally flooded with the hashtag #WeWantDestiny3, with creators Aztecross and Luckyy10p preparing special emotes for the uprising. Moderators deleted messages en masse, unable to stop the wave. The same scene played out at the Summer Game Festival a few days later: fans flooded the chats of one live stream after another, voicing their demand in every broadcast of the event. Wherever video games were discussed during those days, there was someone asking for Destiny 3.
But the theatrical coup is planned for tomorrow. The community has set a date: everyone online on June 9, simultaneously, to inflate the numbers of Destiny 2 until the servers tremble. The declared goal is to exceed 100,000 concurrent users on Steam, a threshold nearly reached but never attained by The Edge of Fate, the last expansion, which stopped at 99,193 players, and perhaps get close to the 300,000 from the glory days (the absolute peak remains 316,750, reached with Lightfall in February 2023, with The Final Shape just shy at 314,634). There’s also a second target, more symbolic and cruel: to surpass the historical record of Marathon, the new game Bungie has bet everything on, which stands at 88,337 users on its best day. Beating a dying game with the creature they chose to focus on: that would send a message.
How we got here: Sony and Bungie's mistakes
Because this is where we get to the heart of the matter, and I have no intention of beating around the bush. This death is not a natural fate: it’s the result of wrong choices, one after the other. Sony bought Bungie in 2022 for 3.6 billion dollars, promising independence and investments. The result, four years later, is an accounting and human disaster: write-downs of 204 million in 2025 and another 765 million in 2026 after the flop of Marathon, three waves of layoffs — about a hundred people in October 2023, 220 in July 2024, and a new ax announced on the same day the date of the last update was revealed — and the promised independence now evaporated, with the studio increasingly squeezed in the grip of PlayStation Studios.
Instead of protecting the golden goose, they squeezed it and then set it aside to chase an extraction shooter that the public ignored. Destiny 3 is not in development, it hasn’t been approved, it doesn’t exist. They preferred to kill what worked to bet on what didn’t. This is mismanagement in its purest form, paid for by employees with their jobs and by players with the end of their world.
It probably won’t change anything. Even if tomorrow night the servers don’t hold up, as has almost always happened in the past during the launch of a new DLC, even if the numbers exceed the heights reached with The Final Shape, Sony won’t feel a thing. I know it. But there is something profoundly beautiful in seeing a community so attached to a game that they refuse to let it die in silence. Twelve years ago I created my first Guardian. Tomorrow I’ll bring it online one last time, along with hundreds of thousands of people who think like me. Not out of delusion. Out of respect. See you there.