It is well-known that Destiny 2 is not in a good spot right now, with record-low playercounts and a nebulous future. But now that has translated into actual Sony commentary and numbers on how the game and Bungie are doing as a whole.
Here’s what Sony said about Destiny 2 specifically during its latest earnings presentation:
“Regarding Destiny 2, partially due to the changes in the competitive environment, the level of sales and the user engagement have not reached the expectation 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.”
I’m not clear whether Sony is talking about just the last year, or Destiny 2 not meeting its goals overall since Bungie was bought in 2022 for $3.6 billion, an eyebrow-raising amount at the time for a studio with one released game. And one that was already five years old at that point.
Since Sony bought Bungie, Destiny 2 has released the much-derided Lightfall expansion, but at the time, it attracted record concurrent players. Its grand finale, The Final Shape, was extremely well-received by players and had almost the same high playercount.
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The Final Shape was back in June 2024, however, over a year ago, and since then, Bungie released The Edge of Fate, its first post-Final Shape expansion which did about a third of TFS’s peak concurrents. Then, in the period that followed that no longer contained actual seasons with the game scaling way back, playercounts crashed to record lows.
What Sony is saying, however, is that the “impairment loss” which is $204 million, does not mean Destiny 2 lost that much, it means that Sony is revising its valuation of Bungie itself, and thinks it’s worth $204 million less.
This is…not terribly surprising. Almost everyone would probably agree that paying $3.6 billion for Bungie was way too high, given its singular, aging game and reliance on future, unproven titles like the long-gestating Marathon. There was also what I would argue was an unreasonable expectation that Bungie would somehow figure out how to coach a bunch of single-player Sony studios on how to make live-service games. When they did so with Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us Factions, that studio came to the conclusion that…they did not want to maintain a live-service game, given all that it involves.
This all results in a somewhat alarming headline, but what this actually means is not all that surprising. Sony still is pushing Marathon as a big release and maintains it will be out within the next five months, squeezing in before the end of the fiscal year. But will its ultra-high expectations extend to that as well?
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