After the final Destiny 2 update, many fans are blaming Sony, but a former Bungie community manager says the studio was already in emergency territory before the 2022 acquisition.
It is a bittersweet moment for any Destiny fan. Destiny 2 is now effectively in stasis after its final update, and even This Week In Destiny, the weekly ritual that had been running for more than a decade, is coming to an end. Many players have automatically blamed Sony for the state of Bungie’s genre-defining looter shooter, especially after the company acquired the studio for $3.6 billion in 2022, while the decision to back Marathon instead has only made the whole situation more controversial. According to one former employee, however, putting all of this on Sony alone is far too convenient.
Liana Ruppert, a former Destiny 2 community manager, said on social media that the fight had already started before the Sony era. “This fight was pre-Sony”, she wrote, before adding: “Bungie was below the red line before the Sony acquisition. If it wasn’t acquired right then, the studio was very close to shutting its doors at the very least on Destiny. It was an emergency acquisition.” That is a blunt statement, and it complicates the easier narrative that Destiny 2’s collapse can be explained purely through Sony’s later decisions.
Independence Gave Bungie Freedom, but Also a Brutal Burden
Even from the outside, it was not hard to see that Bungie had been in trouble long before the buyout. The studio split from Activision in 2019 to self-publish the MMO-lite Destiny 2, which looked liberating at first, but running a live-service game of that size can turn into a money furnace very quickly. Changes to content delivery, microtransactions, pricing, a declining player base, and layoffs at the studio all pointed toward a situation in which looking for a new partner no longer looked surprising. It looked necessary.
That is how we ended up with Sony paying $3.6 billion to bring Bungie under its own roof, a deal that has not exactly aged like a clean victory. For the 2025 financial year, the Japanese company recorded a $766 million impairment loss related to Bungie, a painful signal that Destiny 2 and Marathon together had failed to meet expectations. The numbers still did not add up after the rescue, and being absorbed by a larger company did not magically erase the structural problems that had already been building.
There is some bitter irony in the story as well. The final Destiny 2 update has temporarily boosted the player count, while fans are already pushing a petition asking Sony to greenlight Destiny 3, even if that currently feels more like shouting into the void than a realistic business plan. The old Destiny Infinity idea, once pitched as a possible way to save the series, has also resurfaced in the conversation, but the real question is how much room remains for a franchise that became a generational success, a business burden, and a community ritual all at once. That is why Ruppert’s comment lands so sharply: it does not absolve Sony, but it makes clear that Bungie’s crisis began much deeper and much earlier than many fans wanted to believe.
Source: PC Gamer
