Sony reported a $560 million impairment charge on Bungie's assets for the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2025. The weak market launch of "Marathon" and record low player numbers for "Destiny 2" are significantly impacting the PlayStation Group's financial results.
The billion-dollar bet is showing cracks.
Sony Interactive Entertainment wrote down a total of approximately $765 million in the past fiscal year in connection with the Bungie acquisition. In the fourth quarter alone, 88,6 billion yen was attributable to impairments of the studio's intangible assets. The company also does not rule out further losses for fiscal year 2026. The goal of establishing Bungie as the spearhead of its live-service strategy is proving to be a costly miscalculation.
"MarathonDestiny 2 launched on March 5, 2026, for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC, but failed to translate the hype into sustained player engagement. Current Steam data shows just over 15.000 concurrent users, while Sony has so far refrained from releasing official sales figures. This often speaks volumes for the Japanese company. Meanwhile, Destiny 2 has reached its lowest sales figures ever on PC. Following waves of layoffs and a change in leadership under Pete Parsons, the studio is once again facing drastic cost-cutting measures.
Bungie has managed the feat of shrinking from a prestigious project to a restructuring case within four years. This is not what Jim Ryan had promised or hoped for.
The end of the live service dogma
The hard facts show a studio suffocating under its own overhead. "Marathon" was supposed to be a fresh start, but the market for extraction shooters reacted with disinterest to the stylistic shift. Initially, it was genuine, as was the endgame, but since then, my interest has waned. Whether the A planned roadmap without a real goal I have my doubts about whether it will bring about a major change.
Destiny 2's player base is shrinking, while production costs for new content are rising. Sony now faces the choice of either pouring more capital into a sinking ship or pulling the plug.
A studio that cost $3,6 billion is currently generating more write-offs than headlines. The question remains: Is the Bungie model still viable, or does Sony need to make a clean break and completely restructure the studio?
Instead of investing everything in a modern Destiny 3, or even a top-tier single-player shooter, they're going for another uninspiring extraction shooter, effectively killing Destiny 2. How many more bad decisions is Bungie going to make?
Ha-Ha
PlayStation's worst investment ever.
Studios that deliver their BEST games but end up incurring huge losses with games nobody wants are closing down.
This bet and going all-in for a Fortnite "hit" has simply given us a PlayStation 5 generation without games.
They're the market leader and only manage to release two games per year, and certain (TOP?!) studios simply haven't delivered a single game this generation.
And of all these live-service crap games, the Last of Us game was probably good, but if it had turned Naughty Dog into a purely live-service studio, they should have merged Naughty Dog and Bungie, since, according to their lead developer, it was almost finished and would have guaranteed ongoing content support.
Und:
Horizon Multiplayer will flop.
This fair game will flop.
And then hopefully the fish will finally be cleaned and they'll go back to doing what the PlayStation 4 generation did so well.
For the PS5 generation, it's still too late, and we've all been royally ripped off, investing our money in empty promises and the lowest-quality console generation of all time.
But for some, that's been enough for years. @McFly 😉
In which comment did I single out the PS5 generation? I've said several times that I don't like the policies or direction since the PS5 launch. I've probably given my two cents about it at least 10 times...
Well, I remembered it differently.
That's what happens when you only read what you want to read.
I don't know why you always made such a fuss with Crydog and me if you're so critical?! We never wrote anything more than that we once "loved" PlayStation and that it "hurts" us to see the brand's decline. We constantly emphasize that PlayStation was great and still has enormous potential, but Sony is messing it up one after another.
The fact that everything after The Last of Us was geared towards that formula, all brands were aligned with it, and their individual identities were stripped away (Uncharted, God of War, etc.), and now all games are cinematic dramas or live services, is unfortunately a reality. Games like Astrobot or Ratchet & Clank are the exception, and there's still no information about a sequel.
Sony simply neglects many franchises or doesn't care about them, while they've created a monoculture of video games with hardly any variety. When something is different, it's usually an open-world drama like Spider-Man, Horizon, etc. Often no better than Ubisoft titles, and even blatantly plagiarized from other franchises (like Horizon Zero Dawn's Monster Hunter, etc.).
These ‘new’ series will then be ridden to death.
So for years now, all you've been getting is:
You forgot Saros has drama too, man, such a stupid story, you couldn't make it up. Ah, there's no point talking to them; if I only read what I want to read, he only sees what he wants to see.
We've been saying this for years 😉 We know we're right, so we won't let anything sway us. All the Naughty Dog insider info alone has confirmed it… and now there's the leaked Uncharted 4 script again.
Some people just want to find everything great and rationalize it all.
We were right about Marathon, just as we were about Concorde, and it will be the same with the new "Horizon" game.
Sony is simply embarrassing and is exploiting its PlayStation brand. They should give us a job and fire poor Hermen; in two years, the place will be running smoothly again. 😉
No, definitely not.
Haha... only that little? Did someone fudge the numbers? xD
That would be great... man... that nobody thought of that before, with all those "competent" university-educated managers.
xD