Bungie and Sony Lay Off Half the Studio and Blame Destiny Instead of Taking Responsibility
Bungie and Sony Lay Off Half the Studio and Blame Destiny Instead of Taking Responsibility
After the end of Destiny 2 updates, the much-feared and widely anticipated layoffs have unfortunately arrived. Bungie announced what the press release on X calls a "reduction in force," without providing any official numbers. Along with the employees, the studio head, Justin Truman, also steps down.
However, we can provide numbers that reflect the scale of the disaster. Paul Tassi, a journalist who has always followed the Destiny universe for Forbes, estimates based on confirmed sources that over four hundred positions have been eliminated, around 50% of the remaining employees. Just a few years ago, the studio still had about sixteen hundred employees. What remains now mostly works on Marathon, the shooter that was supposed to revive the company and has never found an audience.
The financial trajectory is the most embarrassing part. Sony bought Bungie in 2022 for $3.6 billion, a valuation considered inflated from day one. Since then, it has already accounted for write-downs of $765 million, of which $565 million was in the quarter ending March 2026, and the CFO hinted that these won't be the last. An official valuation still close to three billion seems surreal, because the only asset capable of generating revenue today is indeed Marathon.
The Numbers that Disprove the Narrative
Marathon has never taken off. At launch, it did not exceed one hundred thousand users on Steam, stopping at a historical peak of just over eighty-eight thousand, and in the following weeks it dropped to just a few thousand. Even the arrival of the second season, accompanied by a free trial week at the beginning of June, did not change the trajectory: the temporary peak around forty thousand quickly deflated, and after the free trial's effect wore off, the game slipped below ten thousand concurrent users on Steam, with a real base of just a few thousand.
In the same period, the latest update of Destiny 2, Monument of Triumph, brought the community back to the game with a peak of almost 168 thousand users on Steam on June 9, the highest value in two years and well above Marathon's absolute record. This is even heavier considering that Marathon primarily exists on Steam, while Destiny 2 has a much broader console base than on PC. In other words, the game that Bungie and Sony decided to shut down generates numbers that their supposed future cannot even dream of.
The Blame Is Always Someone Else
The leadership mistakes at Bungie over the years are too many to list, and today we are paying the consequences. But Sony’s lightness is also surprising, starting from accepting that $3.6 billion valuation. The only ones to benefit have been those at the top: Pete Parsons, the CEO at the time of the acquisition, and other top executives who pocketed huge sums from the deal, while today over four hundred people have been let go.
The underlying attitude is perfectly summarized in the second paragraph of the press release, which states that Destiny 2 has "disappointed expectations in recent years." Blame is placed on the game, treated as a separate entity from the people who made the decisions that led it to this point. There is no assumption of responsibility, neither from Bungie nor from Sony. This reflects the times, aligning with a leadership class that has stopped being accountable for its choices.
A user on X has published a rewritten version of the press release. It captures not only the sentiment of the players but also what individuals with backbone, competence, and integrity should have written at such a time. Bungie's press release, on the contrary, highlights the cultural, professional, and human poverty of managers who have simultaneously destroyed an IP, a genre, and the value of their own company, dragging down Sony, which had hastily acquired it.
Conclusion
Bitterness remains. Despite all its flaws, Destiny built a world where millions of people connected for ten years, an experiment that, given the conditions of the industry, will be difficult to replicate. Today, the future of Bungie, Destiny, and the very concept of live service, which Bungie effectively invented with Destiny, is inscrutable. The most famous first-person shooter studio in video game history is at significant risk of closing, and doing so in the most dishonorable way.