A coup de grâce for Marathon?
With Bungie facing controversy after controversy throughout the best part of 2025, pertaining primarily to Marathon's art theft scandal and reports about Bungie's management disregarding its developers, Sony may have just delivered the coup de grâce for the troubled studio and/or its upcoming game, revealing in its latest financial report that the 2022 acquisition could have been one of Sony's biggest mistakes investments-wise.
Bungie
According to the report, Sony recorded an "impairment loss" of 31.5 billion yen, roughly $204 million, "against a portion of Bungie, Inc.'s intangible and other assets in connection with Destiny 2" in Q2 2025, dragging the operational income of the entire Game & Network Services division, which includes Sony Interactive Entertainment, down 13%.
In a subsequent investor call, Sony's CFO Lin Tao further stressed that Destiny 2 underperformed the expectations Sony had when acquiring Bungie and has not delivered the level of sales and user engagement they had hoped for, citing "changes in the competitive environment" as the reason for its poor performance.
"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," he said (via IGN). "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."
Bungie
While it is not yet clear whether Bungie's financial losses will indeed be a final blow for Marathon or the studio as a whole, they are certainly not a good sign for a game with such a troubled reputation, making it very likely that we'll hear about new layoffs at Bungie in the near future.
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