Bungie Pulled The Plug On Destiny 2: Now Staff Are Leaking

Added: 2026-05-26

[00:00:00]In 2022, PlayStation paid $3.6 billion for Bungie, and that was paid for on the strengths of Destiny 2 and the promises of the company's leadership. That leadership is now gone. Pete Parsons took his golden parachute, and now Destiny 2 is also gone. And with not even a month of notice, they've just pulled the plug. The live service is over, content is ending, and now they're getting ready for quote, "a beginning for Bungie." But that announcement was only really the surface of this.

[00:00:31]Everything that's came out since is the real story. And overall, I think it's a lot worse than Bungie are saying. What we're absolutely seeing is the old world dying and the new world struggling to be born. Layoffs are already being floated.

[00:00:45]Bungie will absolutely not make it through this unscathed. And looking at the comparative performance of Bungie and Marathon, it's hard to see a way out. This story broke with a headline that honestly more than anything would just piss off Destiny 2 players. They said, "Every end is a new beginning."

[00:01:04]That was the title of the blog post that revealed the end of support for D2. On the 9th of June, Bungie will release the game's final update called the Monument of Triumph, which is an odd name for this update given the last few years, and it is going to be the last one.

[00:01:19]People will get overhauled systems, the return of activities and events from the game's history, and some minor story beats to send off characters. Obviously, the deeper lore, the sense of the verse, and all of the things that people were excited about lore-wise and what that could mean for new content, well, those do all appear to be dead currently. Now, Bungie have been clear. There are no plans to turn off the servers and this entire process is basically them leaving D2 in a state where players can just dip in and out whenever they want. But what sets off alarm bells is that all of this is happening instead of the updates that Bungie had actually planned for the game. So here's the story in that. On the 18th of February, the March major update for Destiny 2 was delayed. It was set to have a bunch of things, including a rewards pass, and that rewards pass stuff is now going to be included in the final patch. Now, there were major gameplay changes planned for later on in the year. These were things like restoring the director menu and replacing the hated portal menu. Those things are still happening. They are being rushed out early. And I've got to say, man, I can't believe that they did away with the director, just how gorgeous it was, and replaced it with a shitty, boring menu that looks and feels like any old video game. But effectively, they're slamming everything they can into this update, and that'll be that. There won't be seasonal events.

[00:02:39]There won't be rolling content. And that's because likely in a few months, many of the staff who built all this stuff, well, it's looking like they won't work at Bungie anymore. In Bungie's Goodbye, they did hint that the Destiny brand would live on. And loads of players took that as a tease for Destiny 3. It is not that. Sources speaking to Bloomberg report that there is no Destiny 3 in development right now. And Paul Taci says that he can now confirm that. Paul has many links within Bungie, so I'm assuming he does know what he's talking about here. What we know is that staff are starting to pitch new projects, which does include Destiny ideas that aren't full sequels, but none of these things have been green lit for production yet. And I know to many of you that's going to seem insane. Surely Destiny 3 is the obvious next thing to go and do. And hey, you can make a Destiny 3 that isn't hampered by some of the tech issues that Destiny 2 has. It makes sense. But why they're not doing it also makes sense, just not sense that's in our favor. Pitching and prototyping is something that requires far fewer staff than, of course, making a big MMO game. And keeping up a consistent live service treadmill, and that does mean that a quote significant number of layoffs are coming at Bungie.

[00:03:57]They haven't announced that, but that is what the reporting says, and I absolutely believe it. They're not coming immediately, but they are coming.

[00:04:03]And at a company town hall done after the announcement, leadership thoroughly dodged questions about the layoffs. Now, for staff, this is a brutal state of affairs. Remember that everyone currently at Bungie is a survivor of the last multiple rounds of layoffs, and they've done everything that they could to keep the game running, which obviously was not enough. I'm not going to sit here and say that Destiny was in a great state. It absolutely in no way was. But this is a team that can be damaged and damaged and damaged that had people pulled off to like do some marathon stuff to get that game out the door. It has been a consistent rolling disaster. Now, what's interesting is the decision to kill Destiny 2 was apparently made earlier this year, but Paul Tassy actually reports that the vast majority of Bungie staff didn't know support was ending until the story went public. Now, of course, a few teams did. Some of those people were building the final June update. Some people had already moved over to Marathon and basically people who were in the know allegedly begged leadership to tell everyone else at the studio. Of course, that didn't happen. And there was secrecy at Bungie. And what's particularly rough is that this meant that people kept on building cancelled content. They were making things that leadership had already decided to kill.

[00:05:23]These are things like Shattered Cycle.

[00:05:25]And that's because nobody told them to stop. So for players, it feels like everything they invested emotionally and financially is just being abandoned. And I think it's fair to say that the staff that the devs also feel a bit abandoned themselves. Now, in the wake of all of this, there have been a lot of questions leveled at Bungie. Why is this happening so suddenly? Why didn't it happen sooner? Like say after the final shape?

[00:05:50]Why aren't Bungie unvaulting all the paid campaign content that they locked away years ago? And perhaps the more grand question, what the hell were you thinking with the last while of Destiny content? How did you ever think this would keep the game in a fit, healthy state? Why were we doing a weird Star Wars expansion thing? Now, the answer to all of this stuff has just ended up being, well, kind of the same. That this all was never the plan. And that ultimately this is down to Bungie, a company that's experienced years of corporate chaos and malfeasant leadership that it's basically just finally hit a wall. It's hit a reckoning. PlayStation can't keep on barreling money into the studio when it's not producing results.

[00:06:34]Now that said, there is one game that we know is not dead. And with Destiny going away, all of the player frustration is going towards Marathon. Take a look at Steam right now. you'll see that Marathon is getting fully reviewbombed.

[00:06:49]People are furious that the resources that could have gone into Destiny 2 or 3 are instead going into Marathon. And look, from a certain point of view, I think that is an understandable frustration. If I was looking at this purely as a player, that is totally how I would feel. Right now, of course, if Marathon had have been a mega success, maybe they would have been able to fund Bungie better. Maybe that would have taken the pressure off Destiny. and maybe then we'd be looking at a new Destiny project being built in parallel with perhaps a slow and more controlled winding down of Destiny 2 support. But obviously that didn't happen. Marathon came out for the people who like it.

[00:07:23]It's a great game, but it's not a mass market success. And while I think it's true that a successful Marathon could have saved Destiny 2, I think there is no doubt that moving piles and piles and piles of devs from D2 and onto Marathon, well, it absolutely did damage. There's no question of that. But it is surface level. It is just the face of the decisions that got us here. And it's those decisions that you really need to understand because they're basically why this [ __ ] has happened. So, let me explain. Ever since the PlayStation acquisition and probably ever since the separation from Activision in 2019, Bungie has been flailing about the place to try and find some sort of path forward. You see, back in 2019, Destiny 2 wasn't meeting financial expectations.

[00:08:08]And of course, it's a game that had came after Destiny 1 had kind of been delivered late. So, there were lots of issues at the studio. And the funny thing is, it wasn't even supposed to be a live service. Yeah, it was supposed to be four separate releases, each uh a game with an expansion pack every other year. That was their plan. Now, when PlayStation bought Bungie, they paid way over the odds because Destiny 2 had just delivered an absolute banger of an expansion. We've talked about that stuff recently, but what's happened to the money is what's actually more important for this story. You see, Bungie's leadership invested their money in any future except for one that had Destiny 2 being extremely important. They spun up several project incubations, including games like Marathon, and those were all designed to find other big hits. But the expectation was that Destiny 2 would continue to make money and continue to fund everything. basically milk the cash cow, take the milk, invest it into other things. That was kind of their plan. But the chaos of the layoffs, the canceled incubation projects, and the leadership pivots around Marathon all reflect Bungie's failures. They never considered for a second that Destiny 2 could fail or that they'd have to face the consequences of that. Put simply, Bungie as an organization took Destiny 2's success and therefore its players for granted. Now, why wouldn't they invest in, say, rebuilding the vaulted content?

[00:09:43]Well, there's an obvious answer because that would reflect less profit and it would risk impacting the live game. And then there's the obvious question. Why wasn't there an incubation project for Destiny 3 that would have made sense given, you know, the final shape? And the answer is because it would not be the old leadership's problem whenever they would leave a few years later. That really is the thing. All they had to do was keep profits consistently out of the red to earn their huge payouts. And those payouts truly were huge. As Bungie's ex senior narrative designer, Robert Brooks, put it, quote, "It turns out the real Destiny killer was Pete Parsons." And the thing is, he's not alone. Paul Tassy, who has covered Destiny for over a decade, pointed to the same thing. The old leaders practically fleeced Sony with the overvalued sale of Bungie and then basically bailed themselves out. Now, you still might be wondering, well, why the hell is this all happening now?

[00:10:41]Well, because the new leadership are taking stock of the chaos that they've been left with, and they're just trying to work out what their best options are and what the hell they're going to do with this bag that they're now left holding. And unfortunately, right now, they think their best option is probably putting everything into Marathon, but not for the reasons you may think. In April 2026, about a month after Marathon launched, Paul Taci reported that Marathon had overtaken Destiny 2 for the number of Bungie developers working on it. Here's the quote. Of the 800 or so remaining Bungie employees, it's now more evenly split with Marathon now edging out Destiny 2 by a bit. Now, this doesn't really track with analyst suggestions that Destiny 2 is actually outperforming Marathon on consoles financially. So, we're still left asking why the hell wouldn't they keep Destiny running? You can just take a look at the Steam charts. And when you do, you can see that Destiny is beating Marathon and PC even though we have many reports suggesting that well, Destiny is still fairly like big and healthy over on consoles, whereas Marathon kind of collapsed in consoles, but did better in PC. So, for Destiny to be beating Marathon on its Steam numbers really does look quite bad. So, what's the answer to all of this? Well, it's pretty simple. Pulling out of a decline is really hard, especially a decline that is built on 12 years of technical debt and logistical decisions. Bloomberg sources suggest that leadership had considered quote ways to retool Destiny 2 to make it more approachable for new players, but that eventually they just decided to cut their losses. Now, let's take a look at the shape of Destiny 2.

[00:12:22]It's obviously a game in decline. And that's a wild thing to say because it hit lifetime peaks just 2 years ago at the climax of the final shape. But what followed that was massively slimmed down plans that just went really badly. It was effectively a bad plan executed worse. What they decided to go for was two small expansions and two major updates. But well, that couldn't even fill a single year. And 2 years of changes to monetization and the expansion production model has not helped the team turn the game around. I mean, how many times has it felt like Bungie have tried to communicate, "We've learned our lessons about Destiny 2.

[00:13:01]We're turning over a new leaf. This is a reset in how we run the game." It's happened a few times. And what we've effectively learned is that there was no clear plan to build on what was there that wouldn't have been incredibly costly. So, in that context, loading staff onto the Marathon lifeboat almost seems like a protective move. That's especially considering the PlayStation cannot afford to have Marathon die. And step back from this for just a second.

[00:13:30]As Paul Tassy puts it, Sony are dangerously close to being not for two.

[00:13:35]Let me explain. They bought a company that they thought would keep on printing money with Destiny 2 and that would have a big new hit in the form of Marathon.

[00:13:44]all while having their live service expertise help everything else Sony was doing. All of those things have failed and most obvious of them, Destiny 2 has been labbotomized within just a few years of that deal closing. And now Marathon is Bungie's only active game.

[00:14:02]And that means that all the studios revenue is going to ride on that one game. And I'd say any chances of revenue from Fair Games, uh, from Tokon, from Horizon Hunters Gathering, or any future online game kind of depends on whether Marathon stays alive because PlayStation can't really abandon Marathon because if they do, I don't think anyone will buy one of their live services again. That's one way in which Marathon being a paid product could actually bite them. And it's why Marathon season 2 announcement was about doubling down on the game and expanding it. They're fixing up onboarding. They're giving people options for PvE and direct PvP and generally they're just reducing friction. Those are all changes that can't be made in a Destiny 2 like game because Destiny 2 from everything that we understand is basically held together with bits of sticky tape, hopes, prayers, and maybe the blood of some of its developers.

[00:15:03]Marathon, for all its problems, is at the very least a newer code base. And certainly, it's a codebase that's early in its overall life as compared to Destiny. So, if you're going to be working on something, you can see how Destiny 2 would have a very high tax on any uh I guess salary that you pump into developing it because it seems that Destiny 2's dev environment is a little bit [ __ ] Perhaps that's not the case with Marathon. and that's why they think that even though Marathon is a game with serious headwinds and trouble that it's probably still the better place to do some sort of bet. Personally, I'm not sure they can pull it off, but I see a little bit of a pathway because their real trick could be well the mode that's coming in the latter half of the new season for Marathon because it actually sounds a lot like Destiny 2's open world areas. Basically, players take on missions and they roam about the place completing objectives with multiple different zones to play through. There's a world where that makes a lot of sense and where a Destiny player could really enjoy that because it wouldn't really feel like the marathon that they didn't end up liking. But let's be real, Destiny 2 players are not going to feel positive about Marathon cuz it looks like the game that kind of kill the one that they love. But regardless of that, Marathon is the plan. I mean, you think about it, Destiny 2, even now, 12 years later, has industry-leading shooter gameplay and design. So giving players a similar enough option in Marathon without any of Destiny's drawbacks from a dev perspective may have been what they saw as a real opportunity for Marathon to actually make Bungie fans happy. I mean come on, it's Marathon.

[00:16:38]It's that thing we played on the Xbox Live Arcade whenever Halo was a thing and they did the re-release of Marathon.

[00:16:45]But that doesn't really hit true, does it? Because the problem is that marathon is not destiny and it never will be Destiny and now nothing will be Destiny.

[00:16:57]This I think is an inflection point for the industry cuz it really is hard to overstate the impact Destiny has had in the games industry. It codified the looter shooter at least in one of its major forms. It became one of the very few successful Western FPS MMOs. It inspired an endless line of competitors as of course every other publisher wanted what Bungie had. Of course, far more often than not, that trend chasing failed. Trend chasing sometimes does work, but it often doesn't. You can just look at the long, long queue of WoW killers that um in fact uh well did end up dying. And it seems to me there's an obvious reason why. Games like WoW and Destiny captured their likely player base, right? It's probably the case that there just wasn't much more room in the market for more and more and more games like that. Because for most people, Destiny was the narrative and gameplay experience that they wanted, that they love, that captured hearts and minds, which is of course why we are seeing anger and heartbreak now. And while most of the competitors failed, there is one that did really well. It's Warframe.

[00:18:00]That's a game that is as strong as it's ever been, and it's now going to, I'd say, thrive even better in the space that Destiny 2 is leaving behind. Now, what we're left with is Bungie, a company that will limp on and that may someday return to Destiny. But it does so having been forced to give up one of the biggest games in the world. All because a handful of executives took it for granted, could not plan ahead, and ultimately in how they structured the company, did all that they could to be acquirable at a goddamn high valuation, one far higher than the company could support. It is no surprise that when CEO Pete Parsons left in his golden parachute getting himself his massive uh payout that PlayStation didn't replace him as CEO. Bungie doesn't have uh its own CEO. That's pretty much cuz PlayStation have had to come in and work out what the [ __ ] they're going to do with the shell of Bungie that is left.

[00:19:06]And that is a shell that itself is but a shade of the former Bungie with the former Bungie being the one that they bought at a massively inflated value. So for PlayStation, this could not look worse, especially cuz we all kind of knew that Bungie's expertise was supposed to be the fulcrum of their life service strategy. A strategy that is looking more doomed than ever. But that's not the only doomed thing. Who is a little bit doomed is Changham Kim.

[00:19:38]He's the CEO of Grafton. He asked Chat Jippidity to get him out of a really big payout. But now that Subnotica 2 has launched. Oh. Oh, he is going to have to pay a huge payout as you'll find out in this video next, it could actually be even worse.