Marathon

Bungie

While most of Sony’s recent earnings news this week was positive, there was one very glaring red mark in the books. That would be Bungie, for which Sony revealed another $565 million in impairment losses, joining the $200 million it had announced previously. Despite that, Sony said it is backing Bungie’s recent underperforming release, Marathon, and continues to support the studio. But there’s a lot to dissect here, so let’s go through it.

• What is now $765 million dollars in impairment losses against Bungie is not something as simple as “Bungie games are $765 million in the red.” Rather, what impairment losses are doing is acknowledging that Bungie is not as valuable an asset as Sony thought it was when it bought it for $3.6 billion, so it keeps knocking that number down.
• Sony, looking ahead to FY2026, says it believes those impairment losses for Bungie will be absent, or at least way less than the 120.1 billion yen/$565 million from this year. It remains rather wild that Sony ever thought Bungie was worth $3.6 billion, which was eyebrow-raising at the time, and from an outside perspective, it still seems that it’s probably worth less than Sony is saying, especially given recent events.
• Despite this, Sony has at least publicly backed Bungie’s continued work on Marathon, saying: “Player reception to Marathon is strong, receiving a Metacritic score of 82 and more than 90% of the player reviews on Steam being positive. Engagement metrics such as retention also remain at a high level. Going forward, we aim to improve the performance of the game by working to retain highly engaged core users through the introduction of additional content, further improvements in the gameplay experience, and expansion of the user base."

• That optimism seems unwarranted if you’ve been tracking the performance of the game, which has continually lost players since launch with no signs of anything resembling a turnaround, even as moves have been made to appeal to more casual players. On PC, its main platform, it’s about to dip below Destiny 2’s nightly numbers, an 11-year-old game that is in the middle of its longest content drought in its history.
• Even if Sony is saying this now, there’s nothing to guarantee a lack of poor outcomes for Bungie, including layoffs to reduce costs, which in turn would mean less investment in these games, which would likely mean fewer players, a spiral we’ve already seen with Destiny. It is very clear that Bungie does not currently have enough resources to produce enough content for Destiny 2, the studio now tilting in favor of Marathon in terms of total devs assigned. And that isn’t going well either.
• Destiny 2 simply…wasn’t mentioned at all, which is disconcerting for what was Bungie’s flagship franchise and now a game that has no clear roadmap for the future. Fans are hoping that Destiny 3 may soon be announced, but there are no indications that is going to be the case, and that would likely have to come with a near-total shutdown on work on Destiny 2 for years to come.

But there is no imminent plug-pulling of Marathon, which I’ve always predicted will get at least a year of content to see if it can find an audience. Nor do I believe Sony is on the verge of closing Bungie itself, even if its value has fallen as an asset. After all it’s asset that Sony is still valuing at billions, mind you. This is not Concord, the Sony game made by a brand new studio that arrived with 700 concurrent PC players, where both were shuttered. But to say the good news coming out of all this is “Well, at least Bungie and Marathon weren’t just publicly executed,” that’s not exactly a great place to be. It’s almost entirely bad news, and this idea that Bungie can assuredly turn Marathon around is not something that reflects the reality on the ground, not from any data we can see. The studio continues to navigate choppy seas, but Sony is not yet scuttling the ship.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.