Bungie was purchased by Sony for $3.6 billion at the peak of the covid gaming bubble. It’s been mostly downhill from there. Outside of occasional bright spots, like the Destiny 2: The Final Shape expansion that capped off more than a decade of storytelling, the studio has faced reported revenue shortfalls and repeated mass layoffs. The result has left Destiny 2 in tatters and even the recently launched Marathon on life support. Things need to change and that change is starting now.
That’s the message of a new video the studio released on September 21 called “The Next Chapter for Bungie.” In it, newly appointed studio head Poria Torkan and head of product and Marathon GM Josh Deane address the studio’s struggles and commit to a new era of accountability that begins with rebuilding trust with long-time fans.
“Bungie has been creating games for over 30 years and we have welcomed the communities that have formed around them,” the pair said in a new blog post. “Over the last few years, we lost sight of that, and there have been real consequences. We lost trust, we lost incredible colleagues, and we lost sight of what we should be prioritizing most, our players. As a new leadership team, we must own that. We aren’t just listening to feedback, we understand your disappointment. We are not asking you to trust what we say today. We know that trust must be earned through the quality of our games, the decisions we make, and how consistently we show up for our players.”
The changes are starting small. There’s nothing radical like the end of Marathon or a plan to create Destiny 3. Instead, Bungie is committing to continue working on Destiny 2 by adding back old content that was vaulted years ago in order to have a version of the game that feels complete. As for Marathon, the studio is working to deliver a PvE mode by December that can help breath new life into the live-service extraction shooter as it flounders just six months after launch.
“This is an important time for Bungie,” today’s blog post continued. “Our future depends on making clear choices about where we focus, delivering what we say we will, and being honest about our successes and failures. Stability doesn’t mean shrinking our ambition. It just means that we have to focus on the things you want to see from us, and making sure our vision matches our reality. How we bring this new Bungie to life has to be through the spirit of putting players at the forefront of what we do. We have to find a way back to making games that we want to play, but with you at the center.”