Destiny 2 fans have turned Marathon‘s Steam review page into the latest flashpoint in the Bungie community meltdown, flooding the extraction shooter with negative reviews following Bungie‘s announcement that Destiny 2 will sunset with a final update in June 2026 – as reported by Kotaku. More than 250 negative reviews hit Marathon across three days, dragging its recent rating from 86% positive down to 77%. The move was swift, coordinated enough to register, and pointed squarely at the wrong target.
Here’s the context: The fan theory driving this is that Sony is deliberately killing Destiny 2 to give Marathon room to breathe – that resources, runway, and investment that could have funded a sequel or a reboot were instead poured into Bungie‘s new PvP extraction shooter. It’s an emotionally coherent story for a grieving fanbase, but it doesn’t hold up under much scrutiny. Destiny 2‘s decline was well underway before Marathon ever launched – cracks in the foundation were visible even before The Final Shape arrived in 2024, and the game has stumbled through misstep after misstep since. Meanwhile, Marathon peaked at under 100,000 daily concurrent players on Steam, compared to Destiny 2‘s all-time peak of over 300,000 – hardly the profile of a resource-hungry juggernaut devouring its older sibling. Sony also took a massive financial hit tied to Bungie’s underperformance, which makes the idea that the publisher is strategically starving one game to feed another even harder to sustain.
The counter-reaction was just as fast. Marathon players flooded back with over 500 positive reviews in the same window, and at least some voices tried to build a bridge rather than burn one. One lapsed Destiny 2 player wrote that “Marathon bridges the gap between the two really beautifully,” framing it as a natural home for fans of both Hunt: Showdown-style extraction tension and Bungie‘s signature gunfeel. That perspective is genuinely interesting – it just got buried under the noise of a community processing grief by finding something to punish.
Honestly, what this review war actually reveals isn’t really about Marathon at all. It’s a community using the only lever it has – Steam review scores – to express something much larger: years of accumulated frustration with Bungie‘s handling of Destiny 2, from the Content Vault backlash to monetisation friction to the slow, demoralising drip of post-Final Shape missteps, all collapsing into a single announcement that the game they invested years into is simply ending. Marathon is a proxy target – it’s easier to one-star a live product than to reckon with the structural failures that led a studio to sunset its flagship. We’ve seen this pattern before; Helldivers 2 watched its Steam rating crater over the PSN account linking controversy, and the rating damage outlasted the actual policy dispute. The reputational cost to Marathon here is real, even if the logic driving it isn’t. Bungie is ending support for Destiny 2 on its own terms, and no amount of negative reviews on a separate game changes that calculus.
What remains unclear is whether Bungie will respond publicly to the review situation or let it fade – and whether the rating dip has any measurable effect on Marathon‘s player acquisition or Sony‘s confidence in the game’s trajectory. The more consequential question is whether Marathon‘s upcoming PvE-only mode and continued content updates can stabilise its audience before this noise does lasting damage. Steam Charts data over the next few weeks will be the clearest signal of whether any of this moved the needle.
Do you think targeting Marathon‘s reviews is a justified way for Destiny 2 fans to express their frustration, or does it feel like punishing the wrong game for Bungie‘s decisions? And do you think Marathon has what it takes to carve out a sustainable audience – with or without the Destiny 2 fanbase on side? Sound off in the comments below, and keep your eyes on GameLuster for more Bungie and live service gaming coverage.
