Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier has dropped another headache for Bungie. According to his reporting, the studio is preparing a significant round of layoffs as active development on Destiny 2 winds down, and there’s no Destiny 3 in active production to absorb the workload.
Schreier reports that some Bungie staff are pitching and prototyping new ideas, including concepts tied to the Destiny universe. None of them have been greenlit.
That leaves Bungie in an unusual spot for an AAA studio: its long-running flagship is being wound down, no full-scale successor exists, and the next project pipeline is still in the early “let’s see if this sticks” phase.
Bungie ended active development on Destiny 2, the live-service shooter that has carried the studio since 2017. That doesn’t mean servers are shutting down tomorrow, but it does mean the era of big expansions and heavy content drops is over.
Schreier’s report indicates leadership considered reworking Destiny 2 to be more friendly to new players but instead chose to end development, partly to shift resources toward Marathon.
The number of affected employees, exact timing, and which teams will be hit haven’t been detailed. Bungie and Sony haven’t publicly commented.
No Destiny 3, no greenlit backup plan
The most striking part of the report is the confirmation that Destiny 3 isn’t currently being built. Given AAA development cycles regularly run five years or more, even a green light tomorrow would put a true sequel deep into the future.
A previously reported Destiny-universe project codenamed Payback was canceled during earlier restructuring. Prior reporting described Payback as a spinoff rather than a traditional Destiny 3, possibly with third-person elements and influences from Warframe or Genshin Impact.
For clarity, Destiny Rising, the mobile project from NetEase, is a separate spinoff and not Bungie’s mainline continuation.
Marathon carries the torch
That leaves Marathon, Bungie’s revival of its 1990s sci-fi shooter, as the studio’s main known project. Reworked into a multiplayer extraction shooter, it sits in a more niche genre alongside titles like Escape from Tarkov and Hunt: Showdown.
Whether Marathon can carry an entire studio while pitches and prototypes slowly cook in the background is the question Bungie now has to answer.
Destiny 2 will keep running, Marathon is still coming, and a future Destiny project could theoretically still get a green light down the line. But as of this report, Bungie doesn’t have a confirmed major follow-up to the franchise that built its post-Halo identity.
