Bungie confirmed it is ending development on Destiny 2 after nearly a decade, with the studio planning one final update before putting the game into maintenance mode indefinitely.

The announcement feels like a watershed moment for live-service gaming, like it is saying that if a franchise that normally pulled in hundreds of thousands of players at expansion launch still couldn't keep going, then the whole space is headed toward a reckoning about which titles can actually last after long-term money gets poured in.

Meanwhile the studio, bought by Sony in 2022 for “a few billion dollars," is quietly pivoting away from everything else and putting more emphasis on Marathon, an extraction shooter that is still under development.

As such, the change leaves the future of Destiny 2 forever hanging in limbo, as there is currently no official Destiny 3 in development, despite all hints from within Bungie that there is none on the horizon after a decade.

Joining the ranks of other failed live services, including Anthem, Marvel's Avengers, Concord, and Highguard, which all garnered much fanfare at launch but were eventually abandoned or stagnated.

Despite the fact that there was still significant play, with numbers reaching into the hundreds of thousands for each content drop.

It seems clear that the players have reached the point where they are just tired of paying for season passes and battle passes.