Sony’s Bungie Write-Down Reached From Marathon to Layoffs

Sony recorded an 88.6 billion yen ($565 million) impairment against Bungie in the quarter Marathon launched, then spent the summer ending Destiny 2’s live service and cutting 292 Bellevue jobs.

The same May 8 remarks that cited Marathon’s Metacritic score of 82 also wiped the studio’s remaining fixed assets and left only goodwill on the books.

The Charge That Zeroed Bungie’s Fixed Assets

The May 8 hit sat inside Sony’s fiscal 2025 results for the year ended March 31, 2026. Game & Network Services still posted a record 463.3 billion yen in operating income, up 12%, on 4,685.7 billion yen of sales. The Bungie charge is why that record came with an asterisk.

Lin Tao, Sony’s chief financial officer, said earnings from Bungie’s title portfolio did not reach the company’s plan, so Sony revised that plan down and impaired Bungie’s remaining fixed assets other than goodwill.

Earnings from Bungie’s title portfolio did not reach our expectations, so we downwardly revised our business plan and impaired the full amount of the fixed assets related to Bungie except for goodwill.

Lin Tao, CFO, Sony Group FY2025 results remarks

That Q4 line was the second markdown of the year. Sony had already booked 31.5 billion yen against Bungie in the second quarter, after Destiny 2 sales and engagement missed the levels assumed at the 2022 purchase. The two charges total 120.1 billion yen for the fiscal year.

HOW THE BUNGIE CHARGES STACKED

In November 2025, on the Q2 call, Tao had already flagged extra impairment if Marathon missed plan or if Destiny 2 slipped again. He also said goodwill is tested at the whole games segment, so it was not on the table then. By May the rest of the studio’s fixed assets were gone. Goodwill stayed.

Live-Service Expertise, Priced at $3.6 Billion

Sony announced the Bungie buy on January 31, 2022, at $3.6 billion and closed it on July 15, 2022. A later securities filing put total consideration at 510,459 million yen ($3,701 million), including pay that depended on people staying. Of that, 347,768 million yen ($2,522 million) was purchase consideration. The other 162,691 million yen ($1,179 million) was mostly deferred pay for employee shareholders and other stay bonuses.

The filing assigned goodwill of 193.8 billion yen to the deal, described as future growth and synergies, and said the point of the purchase was Bungie’s live-game methods and tech. Jim Ryan, then head of Sony Interactive Entertainment, talked at the time about using that skill to reach hundreds of millions of players. Bungie was to remain a multiplatform publisher, with games wherever its community already played.

That structure is why the May charge reads as a rewritten plan rather than a studio sale. Sony did not write off the name. It wrote off the assets tied to a cash-flow forecast that no longer held, and it kept the residual goodwill inside Game & Network Services.

Marathon’s Steam Chart Never Looked Like Destiny’s

Marathon launched on March 5, 2026, on PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X, at Marathon’s $39.99 Steam listing. Steam concurrent players peaked at 88,337 on March 6, per Steambase counts drawn from Steam. Four weeks later the fiscal quarter ended, and Sony took the 88.6 billion yen charge.

Tao still called reception strong. He cited the 82 Metacritic score, more than 90% positive Steam reviews at the time, and high retention, and he said Sony would try to keep that core while adding content and widening the audience. Alinea Analytics, a few weeks after launch, put sales at about 1.2 million copies and gross revenue at about $55 million, with roughly 70% of those copies on Steam (about 800,000), 217,000 on PS5 (about 19%), and 133,000 on Xbox (about 11%).

A first-party Sony studio selling most of its new shooter on PC is the deal Sony signed in 2022. It is also a weak return on a $39.99 game that had to carry a live-service cost base. By September 12, Steambase showed 8,616 people in Marathon, 90% below the March 6 peak. June’s Season 2 peak of 40,686 was the one real rebound, and it did not hold.

STEAM CONCURRENT COUNTS, TWO BUNGIE GAMES

Steam’s review mix moved too. Steambase’s September tally was 49,103 positive and 14,968 negative, 64,071 reviews, a player score of 77 and a Mostly Positive rating. That is a different window from Tao’s May “more than 90%” line, and it is the window the game now lives in.

167,867 Guardians Logged In for the Sendoff

On May 21, Bungie said it would ship the final live-service content update for Destiny 2 on June 9 and then stop planned live updates. The game would stay playable, the studio said, the way the original Destiny still is. Monument of Triumph, Update 9.7.0, landed as a free, permanent sendoff: returning activities, a new Pantheon, Sparrow Racing League back in the mix, and a last rewards pass.

Steam concurrent players on that sendoff peaked at 167,867, nearly twice Marathon’s lifetime high. The franchise Sony had already marked down in Q2, and then stopped feeding, still drew a crowd the new extraction shooter has never matched. Destiny 2 was not switched off. It went into maintenance. On September 13, Steambase still showed 85,211 people in Destiny 2, about ten times Marathon’s mid-September Steam reading.

The louder split in that audience is now structural. Destiny players treated the June login spike as a wake and a protest. Marathon’s remaining players are a harder extraction niche that was never going to replace a decade of Destiny spending. High retention, in that setting, can describe a smaller group that keeps coming back while the commercial case shrinks.

A Washington WARN Notice Lists 292 Jobs

On June 25, two weeks after Monument of Triumph, Bungie posted a reduction in force. PlayStation Studios head Hermen Hulst told staff the decision followed months of review with Bungie leadership of the studio’s direction, priorities, and place in the wider slate.

WHO HULST SAID THE CUTS HIT

• Destiny: Most of the Destiny team, after the live-service run ended.
• Marathon: Some Marathon team members, even as Hulst called the game an important part of the portfolio.
• Support: Sony Interactive Entertainment staff who backed Bungie’s day-to-day operations.

A Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification filed with the Washington State Employment Security Department listed 292 jobs at Bungie’s Bellevue headquarters, with a separation date of July 9. The filing covers Washington. It does not count anyone outside the state, so it is a floor, not a global total. Job titles in the notice ran across art, engineering, production, design, animation, and audio.

Bungie’s own note was blunt about the old franchise and the new size of the company.

As the leaders of Bungie, past and present, we recognize Destiny 2 fell short of expectations these past several years. Following our final content update to Destiny 2, and with our future projects still in early incubation, we unfortunately could not continue operating at our previous size.

Bungie, studio statement, June 25, 2026

The studio posted that message on X the same day.

pic.twitter.com/ceJTcKMs23

— Bungie (@Bungie) June 25, 2026

It was Bungie’s third round of cuts since Sony closed the deal. Hulst said Marathon remains in the slate and that incubation work on unnamed future projects continues. He offered no dates and no names for those projects. Hideaki Nishino, PlayStation’s chief executive, said in the same week that the company still wants live-service games in the mix. The Destiny live team was not part of that mix anymore.

Season 2 Did Not Reverse Marathon’s Slide

Sony’s next public word on the game came on July 31, in the Q1 FY2026 remarks for the three months ended June 30. The speech said Season 2, which arrived in June, had kept a high user retention rate and had also brought in new users. Game & Network Services operating income in that quarter was 202.0 billion yen, up from 148.0 billion yen a year earlier. The Bungie impairment did not repeat in the slides.

June’s Steam peak of 40,686 is the chart version of that Season 2 bump. May’s peak had been 17,131. The June figure is real, and it is still less than half of launch week, and it did not set a new baseline. By mid-September the Steam concurrent count was back in the low thousands. Sony can keep a core and still miss the plan that justified the 2022 price. That is what the May write-down already said in accounting language.

The extraction-shooter comparison is ugly in a different way. Arc Raiders, which launched in the same genre lane, has shown Steam peaks several times Marathon’s 88,337. Marathon is the expensive, hardcore cousin: die and you lose your kit. Critics liked the craft. The audience that pays for a live shooter every week went elsewhere, or stayed in Destiny 2 after Bungie told them the seasons were over.

Why the Write-Down Barely Moved PlayStation

Sony Group’s continuing operations for FY25 still set records: 12,479.6 billion yen in sales, up 4%, and 1,447.5 billion yen in operating income, up 13%. Inside games, Sony said that excluding 138.4 billion yen of one-time items, operating income rose 45%. Those one-time items were the 120.1 billion yen Bungie impairments plus 18.3 billion yen from a correction to capitalized development costs. In May, Sony forecast games operating income of 600 billion yen for FY26, helped by the absence of the Bungie charge. In July it raised that games forecast to 660 billion yen.

PlayStation, in other words, did not need Bungie to have a good year. Network services, foreign exchange, and the rest of the catalog carried the segment. Bungie was the hole inside a larger profit.

THE 2022 BET, MARKED TO MARKET

1. July 15, 2022: Sony closes the Bungie purchase and books the studio, including 193,801 million yen of goodwill, inside Game & Network Services.
2. November 2025: Sony records 31.5 billion yen against Bungie after Destiny 2 misses the acquisition plan, and warns that Marathon could trigger more.
3. March 5, 2026: Marathon launches. Steam peaks at 88,337 the next day.
4. May 8, 2026: Sony records 88.6 billion yen more, zeroing remaining Bungie fixed assets except goodwill, while citing Marathon’s 82 Metacritic score.
5. June 9, 2026: Destiny 2’s last live update ships. Steam hits 167,867 concurrent players.
6. June 25, 2026: Bungie and Hulst announce the reduction in force; Washington’s filing lists 292 Bellevue jobs.
7. July 31, 2026: Sony says Season 2 is retaining users and adding new ones, with no new Bungie impairment on the quarter’s slides.

What Sony still carries is the goodwill and a live extraction shooter whose Steam peak is now a memory. Destiny 2 is the game that still fills instances, in maintenance, with most of its team gone. Marathon is the product the rewritten plan has to earn. The 88.6 billion yen charge was the first public admission that the 2022 forecast was wrong. The sendoff, the WARN notice, and the autumn Steam chart are what that admission looked like in the studio.