Sony-owned Bungie is preparing a significant new round of layoffs, Bloomberg's Jason Schreier reported on May 21, 2026 — the same day the studio announced that Destiny 2 will receive its final live-service content update on June 9, ending nearly a decade of continuous development. The cuts will be the studio's third since Sony acquired it for $3.6 billion in 2022, and they arrive at the worst possible moment: Bungie has no approved successor project for the Destiny 2 team, no Destiny 3 in active production, and an extraction shooter, Marathon, that has already shed the majority of its launch audience on Steam.
Destiny 2 Ends Active Development June 9, Servers Stay Live
Bungie confirmed that the final content update — titled Destiny 2: Monument of Triumph — will arrive June 9, 2026, as a free download for all players. The update bundles new gameplay systems including a permanent return of Sparrow Racing League, updated raid and dungeon loot, and a new rewards pass featuring an exotic hand cannon. A Destiny 2: The Collection package containing all content packs will also go on sale that day.
Active development ends there. Seasonal updates, new expansions, and story content are finished. Bungie says the game will remain playable indefinitely — the studio has kept the original Destiny servers online for more than a decade after that game's own sunset — but no further content is planned. The studio formally acknowledged in its announcement that "the time for our shared worlds, and Destiny, to live beyond Destiny 2" had arrived.
What that future looks like, and who at Bungie will be around to build it, is the more troubling question.
No Destiny 3, No Replacement Project: Third Layoff Wave Incoming
The most damaging element of Schreier's reporting is not the layoffs themselves but the void behind them. According to sources familiar with Bungie's plans, the Destiny 2 development team has no project to move to. Sony has not greenlighted any new title for that team, and Destiny 3 is not in active production despite internal pitches and, as recently as November 2025, published leak reports suggesting otherwise. Those reports were unfounded. The pipeline, for the foreseeable future, is empty.
A Destiny spin-off codenamed Payback, developed internally by Luke Smith and Mark Noseworthy — key figures from Destiny 2's revival era under the Forsaken and The Taken King expansions — was quietly canceled following the Sony acquisition. Both developers have since left the company.
Some Destiny 2 staff have already been reassigned to Marathon support, and Bungie says it will begin incubating new concepts internally. But with approximately 400 of Bungie's remaining staff on Marathon and the game struggling to sustain its early audience, there is not enough room there to absorb the full Destiny 2 team.
Marathon's Mixed Performance Leaves Little Room
Marathon launched March 5, 2026 as Bungie's $40 extraction shooter — the studio's first wholly new franchise since Destiny launched in 2014. The game received generally positive reviews, earned an 84.8% rating on Steam at launch, and sold an estimated 1.2 million copies across all platforms within its first three weeks, generating roughly $55 million in gross revenue.
Those numbers were not enough. Sony's own accounting team, reviewing the quarter that closed four weeks after Marathon's launch, recorded a $565 million impairment against Bungie's assets in Q4 of fiscal year 2025 — on top of a $201 million write-down in Q2 tied to Destiny 2's continued decline. The full-year total: $766 million written off Bungie's value in a single fiscal year. Sony CFO Lin Tao confirmed in the May 2026 earnings call that Bungie's earnings "did not reach expectations" and that Sony had revised its business projections and impaired the full amount of Bungie's fixed assets, excluding goodwill.
On Steam, Marathon's concurrent player count had fallen 59% below its launch peak by mid-April. The game's 24-hour peak hovered around 31,000 players a month after release, down from an all-time peak of 88,337 on launch day. While console numbers are not publicly tracked and may tell a different story, the studio has cited Steam as its strongest platform.
Three Rounds of Cuts in Three Years
The current layoffs — number and timing still unspecified — will be Bungie's third round since the Sony acquisition closed in early 2022.
In October 2023, Bungie cut roughly 100 employees, around 8% of its workforce at the time, after Destiny 2 revenue ran 45% below the full-year outlook following the poorly received Lightfall expansion.
In July 2024, the studio laid off 220 more employees — 17% of its workforce — despite Destiny 2: The Final Shape having just exceeded internal projections. An additional 155 employees were moved into Sony Interactive Entertainment's broader structure. Former Bungie employees told TechCrunch they were caught off guard. "It kind of feels like upper management is being very two-faced about it," said Guilhem Lagarde, a product support technician who was laid off that day. "Like they're telling us one thing, but behind the scenes, something else is happening." Those 220 employees also lost unvested stock from the Sony acquisition.
Pete Parsons, who had led Bungie as CEO for nearly a decade and presided over both the Sony acquisition and the subsequent contraction, stepped down in August 2025. Justin Truman, formerly the studio's chief development officer and the general manager of Destiny 2, took over as studio head. Truman has not publicly commented on the layoffs reported this week.
What Destiny 2's Wind-Down Means for Live-Service Games
Destiny 2 did not merely run the seasonal live-service model — it largely built it. The game's approach to battle passes, limited-time events, and expansion-led narrative seasons was replicated across dozens of titles in the years that followed. Its commercial peak, sustained through expansions like Forsaken, The Witch Queen, and The Final Shape, generated enormous long-term revenue for Bungie and made a compelling case for the model.
Its closure is a different kind of case study. The game generated the large teams necessary to sustain it — and when player engagement declined and Sony's return-on-investment expectations were not met, those teams had nowhere to land. The GDC 2025 State of the Game Industry report found that 11% of developers surveyed had been laid off in the prior 12 months, with 41% reporting being personally affected by cuts to their teams or organizations. Destiny 2's wind-down, coming alongside similar struggles at studios built on comparable models, is a concrete example of what that industry-wide contraction looks like at the individual studio level.
Bungie says it will focus on Marathon and begin incubating new game concepts for Sony's consideration. Whether Sony will greenlight those projects — given the cumulative write-downs, the three rounds of layoffs, and a flagship bet on Marathon that has not yet found a sustainable audience — is the question on which the studio's future depends.
The lights stay on in the Destiny universe. The team that built it now faces an uncertain road.
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