RUMOR: Bungie facing LAYOFFS?! They'll have to SHUT DOWN either Marathon or Destiny 2

Added: 2026-05-11

[00:00:00]But I don't want to put the fries in the bag.

[00:00:04]>> Oh, but baby.

[00:00:08]>> What's up, space pirates? This is your admiral, the supremely savage Dr. Disaster. And at a certain point, when a company screws up bad enough, there are consequences. They may not want to admit it at the company that screwed up, but those consequences definitely happen.

[00:00:28]>> I'm getting what I deserve. If I'm reaping what I sow, I'm >> The other day when the Sony earnings report indicated that Bungie was going to be taking the better part of a billion dollar impairment charge, admitting that Marathon had flopped and cost them money. As you can see from the headlines here, Sony insisted that they remain committed to the Marathon project and they claimed that the players for the game remain highly engaged. In other words, the people who are playing marathon sure do seem to like it. This is kind of similar to observing the fact that only flies are eating the turd on the ground. But by golly, those flies sure seem to like it. As this bungee brolied to this news the other day, remember when I made a post last night about how excited I was for the future of Marathon? Remember how I was mocked and insulted for saying that? Marathon isn't going anywhere. And neither am I.

[00:01:35]>> I like to eat [ __ ] >> Well, a new rumor is popping up. And I have to stress that this is still just a rumor, but Detective Seeds does seem to have insiders at Sony that he speaks to regularly. He was very on top of the Bluepoint studio getting shuttered a few months back as an example, but he wrote on X here, I believe that Bungie will have at least 40% reduction in staff at some point this year. Here's why. When I did my Bluepoint report, several of the sources told me that PlayStation has more to trim this year, and the rumor was Bungie or Bend would be next.

[00:02:17]However, it would depend heavily on how Marathon performed, which would be reduced. With Marathon not performing to their needs, I reached out to those sources and they said Bungie acquisition is now complete and they believed at least a 40% reduction would come, possibly up to 50%. I did not include this in my Bluepoint report because it was not tied to Bluepoint closing directly and at the time we did not know the performance of Marathon. Well, now we do and things are looking grim for the people at Bungie.

[00:02:54]>> OH MY GOD. OKAY, it's happening.

[00:02:56]EVERYBODY STAY CALM.

[00:02:56]>> WHAT'S THE PROCEDURE EVERYONE? WHAT'S THE PROCEDURE?

[00:02:59]>> STAY CALM.

[00:03:00]>> EVERYBODY CALM DOWN. TO TOP IT OFF, even Paul Tassy of Forbes, who is a major Bungie supporter, but who has been surprisingly fair on the topic of Marathon, he is suggesting that Bungie is going to have to choose between Destiny 2 or Marathon in the very near future. He doesn't think that both of them can be supported properly. And I tend to agree, especially considering that it sounds as though there is a strong chance that a good number of Bungie employees are going to have to learn a new business phrase to support them in their future endeavors.

[00:03:43]>> Welcome to Good Burger, home of the Good Burger. Can I take your order?

[00:04:10][ __ ] [ __ ] [ __ ] [ __ ] [ __ ] [ __ ] [ __ ] [ __ ] All right, me hardies. Now, before we look at the Forbes article from Paul Tassy suggesting that Bungie is going to have to choose between Marathon and Destiny, I wanted to take a look at a social media post put out on X in response to the news that PlayStation was going to continue to support Marathon because they are happy with the high engagement of the players of this game. He wrote here, "So what I've been told about the Sony retention remains at a highlevel comment is not that it's about overall population, but that it refers to what we saw in that Alana data in March about how those who are into the game are really into it with very high gameplay hours. So, in other words, with Marathon, the company seems to have realized that this is a game that simply does not appeal to the vast majority of the public. Instead, they are interested in attracting people who play the game a lot. The thing about that strategy is that I still don't see how this pays the bills for Bungie, unless these players are dropping thousands of dollars a piece on microtransactions in order to prop the company up. I suppose maybe the thinking is that they want to create a floor for their game's player count that they can build on and expand on. But as you can see from the Steam charts for Marathon, they do seem to have found their floor already. They are now consistently hitting between 12 and 16,000 players at their daily peak levels on Steam. With all of that context in mind, though, let's take a peek at this article here from Forbes, whose headline says simply, "It seems Destiny 2 and Marathon cannot properly coexist at Bungie." And then down here in the article, Tassy wrote, "In the wake of the announcement that Sony has now racked up $765 million in impairment losses against Bungie, devaluing the asset it once purchased for $3.6 $6 billion.

[00:06:20]Significant questions have been raised about the future of the studio and its two games, Marathon and Destiny 2. While Sony acknowledged the underperformance that led to these losses, it continues to back Marathon, saying more content and ideas are on the way to retain hardcore players and attract new ones.

[00:06:42]Destiny 2, Bungie's flagship game, was not mentioned once in either Sony's earnings presentation or call. It is becoming increasingly clear that it is likely not possible to sustain both Destiny 2 and Marathon within a scaledown Bungie, especially as more resources are pulled from Destiny and shoveled over to Marathon, which has more devs working on it. I fear this may be leading to one inescapable conclusion. One has to go or at least be frozen in cryo. And to be clear, if this happens, it will be accompanied by those losses in jobs that are rumored, which I discussed near the start of this video.

[00:07:25]There are currently something around 800 developers working at Bungie, and the split has been around 300 of them working on Marathon while the rest work on Destiny. But in recent months, that split has reportedly changed. There are apparently now more people working on Marathon than they are on Destiny. This kind of tells us which way things are going to go if this happens. But reading on, the article says, "Even with Sony publicly backing Marathon, the game continues to bleed players, directly contradicting Sony's earning statement that retention that remains at a high level, which does not reflect public data. On any given day, Destiny 2 will have more players on Steam during the day, while Marathon is edging above it at night, but only just. But the reality is that Destiny has more players overall given that marathon skews more significantly toward a PC player base.

[00:08:28]This the Destiny series that is in year 11 of content and during its worst down period ever and Marathon which came out 2 months ago. If you have to pick one, what do you pick? Before we get into this, I can hear people already. Am I biased? Sure, I'm biased. I've said publicly that marathon is not for me personally and I have played Destiny for all those 11 years, but I truly do think that objectively Destiny makes the most sense to invest in over Marathon in one form or another. I believe more in the ability to revive Destiny than I do the ability to dramatically expand Marathon's player base and make it more broadly appealing. And I must say that I agree with this completely. Destiny has the ability to appeal to a much broader audience because it is not an extraction shooter, which is certainly a niche, and the characters in Destiny look cool, whereas the characters in Bungie look androgynous and just plain weird and ugly. This isn't rocket science. This is common sense. Destiny has a much stronger chance of being revived. At one point, it was very, ridiculously successful. If Bungie were smart, they'd put their resources into trying to turn Destiny 2 around while quietly working on a Destiny 3. But from the sound of things, a choice will have to be made soon. If somewhere around half of the Bungie employees are let go, then maintaining both games seems like it just ain't going to happen. Anyhow, make sure to hit the like button on this video and subscribe to the channel if you haven't done it already. And if you are already subscribed, make sure that you are still subscribed to the channel.

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[00:10:25]And also, please consider becoming a member of the channel for as little as $5 per month. But I'm going to leave it there. Which game do you think Bungie should focus on? marathon or Destiny 2, or should they pivot hard into Destiny 3 or just do something else? Drop your thoughts on all this into the comment section below, and we will talk there.

[00:10:49]Thanks for watching, me hearties. If you haven't already, your admiral is inviting you to subscribe to the channel and become a part of the crew. Life as a space pirate may not be glamorous, but there's always plenty of booty.