Not even the best performance spared them.
Bungie laying off much of its Destiny team barely two weeks after that team delivered the game's strongest performance in years is the kind of timing that's hard to read as anything but cruel. On June 25, the studio announced a "reduction in force" as part of a reorganisation, with Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO Hermen Hulst confirming in a memo that the cuts hit "most of the Destiny team and some Marathon team members," along with SIE staff who supported the studio. Bungie didn't put a number on it, but reporting from Jason Schreier and Paul Tassi suggests roughly 400 of around 800 remaining employees were let go, which would be close to half the studio. Studio head Justin Truman, who took the role under a year ago, has also stepped down. For a team that just gave Destiny its best send-off in years, the reward was a pink slip.
The sting comes from how recently that team proved it could still deliver. Destiny 2's final content update, Monument of Triumph, launched on June 9 and pulled the game's biggest crowds in ages, peaking at nearly 168,000 concurrent players on Steam alone and an estimated 400,000 across all platforms, comfortably outdrawing the two paid expansions that preceded it. Players passionately rallied around the update, some even campaigning to "break the servers" to demonstrate demand for a Destiny 3. None of it mattered to the outcome. Bungie's own statement acknowledged that "Destiny 2 fell short of expectations these past several years," and explained that "following our final content update to Destiny 2, and with our future projects still in early incubation, we unfortunately could not continue operating at our previous size." In plain terms, the studio judged that a great final month doesn't change the multi-year trajectory, and the people who made that final month happen are the ones paying for it.
Why Demonstrated Success Stopped Being a Shield
This is the pattern that keeps repeating across the industry, and Bungie is just its latest illustration. Shipping something players genuinely love, and turning up the numbers to prove it, has stopped being any kind of protection when the business decision sits several levels above the work itself. Hulst framed the cuts as the result of months reviewing "the studio's long-term direction, development priorities, resource needs, and role within our broader portfolio strategy," which is corporate language for a calculation made on a spreadsheet rather than a server. The logic isn't about whether the Destiny team did good work, because it demonstrably did. It's that with Destiny 2 development ending and nothing new ready to absorb those people, the math no longer supported keeping them on. That's the brutal part. The quality of the send-off and the affection of the community were real, and they were also completely beside the point once the financial review concluded the studio had to shrink.
Marathon Now Carries Everything
What this leaves behind is a Bungie that's far smaller and resting almost entirely on a single uncertain bet. With most of the Destiny team gone and new projects only in "early incubation," the studio's near-term future hangs on Marathon, the extraction shooter that has struggled to find its footing since launch, with declining player numbers and an ongoing effort to rebuild its audience through a planned PvE-only mode arriving July 21. Hulst insisted Marathon "remains an important part of our portfolio," but the pressure on that game is now enormous, since it's effectively the only thing standing between Bungie and an even bleaker conversation. The backdrop makes the stakes plain, since Sony acquired Bungie for $3.6 billion in 2022, reportedly as an emergency rescue to keep the studio from shutting its doors, and has since taken $565 million in impairment losses against that investment. A studio bought for its live-service expertise has now seen Destiny wound down and Marathon stumble, and it heads into its next chapter at roughly half the size it was, hoping early-stage pitches eventually become something.
More:Bungie Is Killing What Works to Save What Flopped
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