Destiny 2 Wraps June 9 as Bungie Pivots to Marathon and Faces Significant Layoffs

Bungie has confirmed that the June 9 update will be the final content drop for Destiny 2, closing nearly nine years of post-launch support for the live service shooter. The announcement lands after Sony logged a 120.1 billion yen operating loss tied to the studio in its latest fiscal year report, roughly $765 million impairment loss for Sony, split between Destiny 2's underperformance and Marathon's launch quarter.

The studio framed the move as a transition rather than a shutdown. Destiny 2 will remain playable after June 9, in the same way the original Destiny remains active with a small community. This is not a Concord-style closure, nor a repeat of the Highguard wind-down earlier this year, when Wildlight Entertainment's shooter shut down less than two months after release.

"While our love for Destiny 2 has not changed, it has become clear that after The Final Shape, we have reached the time for our shared worlds, and Destiny, to live beyond Destiny 2."

— Bungie

A Bloomberg report published alongside the announcement says Bungie is planning significant layoffs and has no Destiny 3 in active development. The outlet's sources, who asked not to be identified, said the studio does not have a new project lined up for the Destiny 2 development team. The exact number of cuts was not disclosed. Staff are looking to pitch and begin development on new projects, including titles set in the Destiny franchise, but none have been greenlit. Bungie's leaders had previously discussed retooling Destiny 2 to make it more approachable for new players, then decided to end the game's development instead.

Sony purchased Bungie for $3.6 billion in 2022. The studio has since laid off hundreds of employees and cancelled Payback, a project once envisioned as the future of the Destiny franchise. The Final Shape expansion launched in 2024 to strong reviews, but the player count has dropped sharply since then. The most recent release, a Star Wars-themed update, drew a fraction of Final Shape's audience.

Sony booked the impairment in two parts: 31.5 billion yen, around $200 million, in Q2 against Destiny 2, then a further 88.6 billion yen, roughly $565 million, in Q4 after Marathon shipped. Marathon launched in March on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S. Alinea Analytics estimated 1.2 million copies sold roughly two weeks after release, generating $55 million in revenue before microtransactions. Around 800,000 copies came from Steam, 217,000 from PS5, and 133,000 from Xbox, putting nearly 70 percent of the player base on PC despite Bungie being a Sony first-party studio. Daily active users sat at 380,000 in late March, down from 478,000 over launch weekend, and the Steam 24-hour concurrent peak now sits at 26,913, down from 88,337 on launch day.

I think Bungie's framing of Destiny 2 as something that will "live beyond" the studio is the cleanest exit from an expensive live service, because the alternative is the full server closure that has dominated headlines around other online shooters this year. I see the move as consistent with how the original Destiny was handled, with the servers staying online while the team rotates onto something else.

Movement out of Bungie has already begun. Former Destiny 2 developer Kwan Perng recently joined CD Projekt RED as Lead Writer, working on The Witcher multiplayer game, Project Sirius. The Boston-based team took over development of the title after a wave of layoffs at The Molasses Flood in 2023, and Perng's hire is one of the first public signals of senior Destiny talent crossing over to the project.

Bungie's immediate focus is on Marathon Season 2, titled Nightfall, which launches on June 2 alongside a full progress wipe that resets every active runner to a common starting point. Runner level, rank, vault contents, loadout contents, credits, schemas, faction level and upgrades, and priority contracts all return to zero. Creative director Julia Nardin told GamesRadar+ that the studio has multiple seasons of post-launch content mapped out.

"We know where we want to take the story over the next few years, but I don't want to say it's completely 'locked in' because it's important to us that our players be able to help shape it."

— Julia Nardin

Bungie is headquartered in Bellevue, Washington, and is one of the more expensive studios for Sony to operate, given the cost of senior staff in the Seattle suburbs. A Sony representative did not immediately respond to Bloomberg's request for comment. The studio has moved some staff from the Destiny team to Marathon in recent months, and the resource shift is already underway ahead of Nightfall's launch.