Destiny Fans Flood Sony's State of Play Chat Demanding Destiny 3

During Sony's State of Play livestream on September 4, fans watching from home did what fans do when they want something badly enough: they filled the chat with a single, repeated demand. The hashtag #WeWantDestiny flooded across multiple broadcast channels, alongside direct calls for Destiny 3. With fifteen minutes left before the presentation began, the message was unmistakable. Bungie's looter shooter franchise, which had defined a generation of online gaming, was what people wanted to hear about. It was not what Sony was prepared to announce.

The timing of the plea was pointed. Bungie had walked away from Destiny 2 earlier in 2024, officially ending development on a game that had been in continuous operation since 2017. The studio's parent company, Sony, had made a strategic choice: redirect resources toward Marathon, an extraction shooter that had launched in early March with a budget exceeding $250 million. The problem was that Marathon had failed to gain traction. Player numbers remained low. Sales fell short of projections. And so, as one project struggled, the other was abandoned, leaving a community of Destiny players with no clear path forward.

The collapse of Destiny 2 did not happen overnight. Trouble began around the time of last summer's Edge of Fate expansion, which underperformed financially. The situation worsened in December when Bungie released Renegades, a Star Wars-themed crossover that performed even worse than Edge of Fate and did nothing to reverse declining sales or player retention. According to reporting by Forbes, Bungie's leadership began exploring scenarios for what came next. One proposal was Destiny Infinity, a full relaunch of the franchise paired with a return to the single-expansion-per-year model that had worked in Destiny's earlier years. The idea was shelved. The costs were deemed too high, the risks too severe, especially given the studio's commitment to Marathon. Destiny 3 was considered, as it always is, but the financial calculus did not support it. No internal signals suggested a third game was in development.

The financial pressure on Bungie had been building for years. Sony acquired the studio in 2022 for $3.6 billion, a massive bet on a company that had been teetering on the edge of closure. By 2024, that bet looked increasingly risky. Sony reported a $765 million impairment loss attributed specifically to Bungie's underperformance. Marathon's struggles only deepened the wound. The studio needed to cut costs, and it did so with brutal efficiency.

In July 2024, Bungie laid off 292 employees at its Bellevue, Washington headquarters, according to a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification filed with the Washington State Employment Security Department. That number did not include staff reductions outside Washington state. This was the studio's third major round of layoffs in three years. Between October 2023 and July 2024 alone, Bungie had cut approximately 320 positions. Local reporting described the cuts as a bloodbath. The studio, which had employed around 1,000 people in Bellevue as recently as 2023, was being hollowed out. No one knew exactly how many people remained on staff after the July cuts, though the studio had employed 850 people as of early 2024.

The history leading to this moment stretched back further. Destiny 2 launched on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in September 2017, with a PC version arriving a month later. For years, the game thrived under Activision's publishing umbrella. But tension between Bungie and Activision grew, and in January 2019, the two companies parted ways, ending a ten-year publishing deal five years early. Bungie took control of Destiny 2 and self-published it, but independence brought its own challenges. Expansions failed to land. The player base contracted. Financial troubles mounted. When Sony stepped in with its $3.6 billion acquisition, it seemed like a rescue. Instead, it became a cautionary tale about the risks of betting on live-service games in an industry grown suddenly risk-averse.

Now, with Destiny 2 dead and Marathon struggling, fans were doing the only thing they could do: they were asking for what they wanted. Whether Sony would listen remained to be seen. The company had already invested heavily in a different future. But in the chat during State of Play, the message was clear: there was an audience for Destiny, and it was not going away quietly.