Sony kills Destiny 3 and guts Bungie after a disastrous $3.6 billion buyout
Remember when Sony threw billions at the creators of Halo thinking they bought a golden goose? Well, that goose just got cooked, stuffed, and served cold. It turns out buying expensive studios in pricey neighborhoods isn't the cheat code to infinite live-service money.
The corporate romance between Sony and Bungie has officially imploded. After paying a staggering $3.6 billion to acquire the studio in 2022, plus throwing another $800 million at employee bonuses, the PlayStation parent company is slashing most of the studio's workforce and pulling the plug on any future hope for Destiny 3.
It turns out that Bungie pitched several new concepts, including spin-offs set in the Destiny universe, but Sony flatly refused to fund them. On top of that, running a massive studio in Bellevue, Washington—one of the most expensive tech hubs in the US—suddenly didn't look so smart when the financial sheets started bleeding red. This expensive zip code, combined with a painful $765 million write-down for the PlayStation division due to the weak performance of Destiny 2 and the troubled development of their upcoming shooter Marathon, sealed the studio's fate.
The remaining resources are now being aggressively funneled into Marathon, which is basically Bungie's last stand. The final update for Destiny 2 is scheduled to drop on June 9, after which the franchise goes into permanent maintenance mode. Meanwhile, Steam charts show that player interest in the upcoming Marathon is currently hovering around the same mediocre levels as the aging Destiny 2, which isn't exactly a great sign for a game that is supposed to save the company.
This marks yet another dramatic chapter in Bungie's chaotic history of relationship issues. They escaped Microsoft in 2007, walked away from a ten-year deal with Activision Blizzard in 2019, enjoyed a brief moment of independence, and then jumped straight into Sony's corporate embrace only to get gutted four years later.
Spending over four billion dollars just to end up with a dead franchise and a high-stakes bet on an unreleased shooter is peak modern gaming industry. It seems the only thing Bungie actually pioneered was the art of burning through corporate cash while convincing every new buyer that "this time it's different."
Source: Bungie
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