Destiny 2 Devs Are Left Scrambling for Projects as Layoffs Officially Loom

Bloomberg reported that Bungie is planning a significant number of layoffs following the end of Destiny 2 development. The studio has no new project lined up for the Destiny 2 team once June 9th arrives, and Destiny 3 is not in production.

The number of cuts is not yet known. What is known is that staff are pitching ideas – including projects within the Destiny universe – but nothing has been greenlit, and there is no guarantee anything will be. Outside of Marathon, the pipeline is empty.

What Marathon Has to Carry

Bungie is all in on Marathon. That is not a strategic choice so much as seemingly the only remaining one.

Marathon launched in March and has not met sales expectations. It currently sits at daily active player numbers comparable to Destiny 2 – a game whose own numbers have been grim enough that Starfield, available for free on Game Pass, has been outperforming it. Roughly 400 people are reportedly still working on Marathon. The studio has been moving Destiny 2 developers across to it in recent months, which tells you a lot about how confident they feel in what they have.

The extraction shooter genre can work. ARC Raiders proved that recently enough. But Marathon needs to find its legs in a market that is not waiting around. They are also funded by a parent company that has already written down $204 million on this studio and publicly named it a drag on operating profit. That is not a comfortable position from which to ask for more runway.

Destiny generated over $500 million in revenue when it launched in 2014. It built a universe vast enough to sustain twelve years of stories, raids, seasonal arcs, and some of the most committed communities in gaming. And almost none of it is accessible in any coherent form.

The comparison that keeps coming to mind is Mass Effect – but imagine if Mass Effect had only ever existed as the ME3 multiplayer mode. All that lore, all that worldbuilding, all those characters, and no single-player experience to anchor it. That is more or less where Destiny ended up.

Bungie sold Halo partly because they apparently didn't want to make single-player games anymore, and that decision shaped everything that followed, for better and considerably for worse.

What Comes Next Is Unclear

Bungie

It would be easy to point at Sony here, and a lot of people will. The framing writes itself: Japanese conglomerate acquires beloved studio for $3.6 billion, runs it into the ground, discards the workers. Tidy narrative. Also, not quite accurate.

Bungie operated with a significant degree of independence after the acquisition, and that was part of the deal. The decisions that led here, the live-service model that made Destiny 2 increasingly hostile to new players, the canceled projects, the repeated rounds of layoffs, the choice to end Destiny 2 without a successor ready – those came from Bungie's own leadership. Sony is the one holding the bag now, but a lot of what's inside was packed by someone else.

Layoffs at the end of an IP's life cycle are, grimly, not unusual in this industry. That doesn't make it less painful for the people involved. June 9th is three weeks away. The layoffs will follow. The people who built twelve years of a world that millions lived in will be looking for work, and the studio will be betting everything on a game that hasn't found its audience yet.

If Marathon fails to turn itself around, Sony's options narrow quickly. Closing the studio entirely seems unlikely given the brand value still attached to the Destiny name. A prolonged period out of the spotlight – quiet development, reduced headcount, waiting for the right moment to come back with something new – seems more plausible, whether that something new ever gets funded is a different question.

Released March 5, 2026

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