Welp, says Sony, sure looks like buying Bungie didn't work out

Bungie's been having a rough old time ever since its 2022 acquisition by Sony: there have been multiple rounds of layoffs, a delay to the seemingly ill-fated extraction shooter Marathon, and then earlier this year a report quoting employees as saying morale is in "free fall." Well, the latest out of Sony isn't going to help that.

In its latest financial report Sony says that Bungie has failed to meet targets and Destiny 2 is underperforming (thanks, IGN). The report includes a 31.5 billion yen (approx. $204.2 million) "impairment loss" that it attributes to Destiny 2 failing to hit targets, with chief financial officer Lin Tao telling investors:

"Regarding Destiny 2, partially due to the changes in the competitive environment, the level of sales and user engagement have not reached the expectations we had at the time of the acquisition of Bungie. While we will continue to make improvements, we downwardly revised the business projection for the time being, and recorded an impairment loss against a portion of the assets at Bungie."

The writing has been on the wall for some time. Destiny 2 is in the doldrums, Marathon feels like it'll need a miracle between now and an apparent March 2026 release, and CEO Pete Parsons departed in August this year after overseeing massive layoffs. A notable element of Parsons' exit was that Bungie no longer has a CEO: instead, as part of Bungie's integration into the Sony machine, Justin Truman is its new studio head.

It's also not too much of a stretch to see Sony's statements in the context of the catastrophe that was Concord. A major part of Sony's rationale for acquiring Bungie was the studio's expertise in the live service genre but, after taking such an eye-watering loss on Concord and closing its developer, the company's once-bullish approach to live service has gone the way of the dodo: it has now cancelled eight out of a dozen live service games that were once in development.

A lot is clearly riding on Marathon. PCG's resident Bungie fanatic Tim Clark found plenty to like in the extraction shooter, even before the delay, but the mood music around the game couldn't be worse: even the devs behind Arc Raiders saw the reactions to Marathon's early playtests as some great feedback on what not to do. These are bad times for a once great studio.