Destiny 2

Bungie

Destiny 2 players were stunned yesterday when Bungie said it was ending development on the game after a final June update. While longer-term, this may have always been coming, so far as the player base knew, at least two more expansions were on the way alongside another year of content. Not so.

In Bungie’s goodbye message, they seemed to hint that the Destiny brand would live on in some form, with players believing it was a tease that Destiny 3 is in development and would be announced at some point to help ease this loss.

That, unfortunately, is not the case. And things are worse for Bungie than most might even understand.

From my own reporting, a recent Jason Schreier piece (whose details I can now confirm) and some amount of common sense, here’s what we know:

• Destiny 3 is not in production, and has not even been greenlit as something to start down the road. It has obviously been pitched many times over, even before The Final Shape, but Sony did not want to spend the money. That has apparently not changed.
• Nothing else has been officially greenlit and is in development yet, even among other non-sequel Destiny ideas Bungie has, where they do want to keep the IP alive.
• Part of the decision to axe Destiny 2 now was to move more resources over to Marathon, now entering its second season.

• However, Bungie, as a roughly 800-person company, is not going to have that many people working on an extraction shooter, and without a clear new project ahead like a Destiny 3, there are going to be “significant” layoffs, according to Schreier’s report.
• The idea of a Destiny 3 has always been a long shot in the current state of Bungie, as given how many devs were working on the game post-Final Shape, they couldn’t manage the new, heavily reduced content schedule. Developing Destiny 3 would obviously involve shutting down Destiny 2, but a true sequel would eventually need many more people working on it, which would require Sony to staff up Bungie specifically, especially if Marathon was still around.

What happens next is figuring out how much Sony is willing to trust Bungie on future projects. They are dangerously close to 0-for-2, having been sold on a company that was going to keep printing money with a healthy Destiny 2 and launch Marathon as a big new multiplayer hit. Neither of those has happened, with Destiny 2 now lobotomized just a few years after the deal and Marathon struggling to find a playerbase.

You can see the problem here. There are no Bungie projects greenlit at all at the moment. Marathon is their only ongoing game, and even the biggest Marathon fans would acknowledge that is not going to be enough to sustain a Bungie anywhere near this size. And if things don’t change, Bungie may not be able to be sustained at all.

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