Bungie goes back to Destiny to save itself?

Originally, I wasn’t going to write this, but Bungie looks to be in trouble with new leadership it’s worth talking about. When Marathon came out I gave the game 6 months. The good news is it’s been 7 months, and it’s not dead yet. Bad news is the game hasn’t been a success. I also worried about the future of Bungie as a studio, fearing Sony would kill it off and write off the massive loss. Job losses in gaming have been brutal, and studios and games have been shut down all over. It’s been a long list of failures, and I suspected Marathon would be Bungie running towards the finish line.

I called Marathon a gamble, betting on the extraction shooter genre to carry the studio. The problem was that another game came out first, Arc Raiders, and by the time Marathon came out the short-lived trend looked over. Even now, games in that space are shifting focus, and some are trying to be less hardcore. The genre never really had legs to go mainstream.

If you’ve been paying attention to the numbers, you’d see very quickly that Marathon alone wouldn’t be enough to keep the lights on at Bungie. Back in May 2026, Destiny 2 was confirmed to get one final update in June, and Marathon would be the studio’s core focus. Even then, the declining player count didn’t signal that was a smart move. New players were not being added. Fast forward Marathon content pipeline had struggled with delays, and now Destiny 2 is getting its content unvaulted and restored, with more Destiny, more Marathon and other projects planned. Seasonal updates to Marathon are now being scrapped, hinting at a shifting focus back towards Destiny 2.

Concurrent player count tells you why: 2,000-2,500 for Marathon against about 30,000 on Steam for a game that’s no longer getting updates. Not hard to see which game should be the focus…

The problems Bungie faces right now go back a decade or more. Destiny 1 was meant to be the start of a series of games, that public knowledge due court papers, press releases confirming it. Destiny 2 shifted towards being live service game after the studio split from Activision and went independent. so the designers never planned it around that model. They made a series of choices which helped doom the studio and the game. All based on Activision green lighting Destiny to begin with. Fixing these mistakes is going to cost a ton of money, and Sony seems to think Bungie still has talent that makes them worth keeping around. Perhaps the other projects mean Destiny 3 is in pre-production. Given studio size most likely early stages I can’t see why not, if the studio is going back to Destiny 2 to restore older content and provide some goodwill. Changing direction 3 months later is, well, something you don’t see at all. Which hints been some serious management changes.

All of this comes after the studio had some pretty serious layoffs, and more layoffs, and even more over the last couple of years. The studio is now at around 500, compared to about 1,300 at its peak. Plenty of veterans have been let go or quit.

Compare that to Digital Extremes, which has two games on the go at the moment and says it has more than 450 staff. That’s about the same size as Bungie. And that’s before you consider the output. Digital Extremes has mastered live-service games, and Warframe has produced far more updates than Destiny 2 did over a similar period of time. Bungie focused on big updates, Warframe did smaller updates with bigger updates in between. It also has far more features, and it feels far more complete. They took risks and built the game from the ground up to be an update machine, with a very clear idea of how much stuff can be on screen. And now they have two games, Warframe and Soulframe, plus they helped work on other projects during this time. Destiny on other hand you can tell they focused more on looks and that caused problems. Never planned to be a modular, constantly updating game and age of engine is most likely causing problems now. This why I think we’re going to get Destiny 3 after restoring Destiny 2 content lost from launch.

With more unanswered questions, it seems Bungie is going back to Destiny 2, which suggests the team knows what the game needs and wants to bring back content lost through choices made in the past. Maybe we’ll see another update, or some new content to tide us over, or changes to help fund Destiny 3, whatever project they’re working on. Bungie will likely have to expand or shift away from Marathon, but we don’t know the full scope of what it wants to do with Destiny 2. I suspect a third game is in the works, and that with everything that has happened, they’ll be learning from past mistakes. Maybe we get something else in the pipeline too.

I know it’s early days, but trust is broken.