Bungie is reportedly ending active development on Destiny 2 after nearly nine years of live service support, with the final update dropping on June 9th, as reported by Push Square. The game will remain online and playable indefinitely, but there will be no further content updates – marking a definitive endpoint for one of the most ambitious live service experiments in gaming history. Bungie is framing the shift as a “new beginning,” with the studio now focused on “incubating our next games” and making Destiny 2 a “welcome place for players to return to” with its final patch.
Here’s the context: Destiny 2 launched in 2017 as a paid boxed title before Bungie pivoted it to a free-to-play model in 2019, expanding into years of seasonal content, expansions, and an ever-growing lore universe. Sony acquired Bungie for $3.6 billion in 2022, positioning the studio as the cornerstone of its live service ambitions – but those ambitions have been costly. As we covered, Sony has taken a staggering ~$765 million in write-downs against Bungie’s value, a figure that tells you everything you need to know about how far the studio’s output has fallen short of expectations. Destiny 2‘s Steam concurrent player count, which peaked above 316,000 during The Witch Queen‘s launch in early 2022, had collapsed to under 50,000 average concurrents through much of 2025 according to Steam Charts. The 2024 expansion The Final Shape wrapped up the game’s main storyline, and last year’s Star Wars-themed Renegades expansion failed to reverse the slide. Meanwhile, Bungie‘s extraction shooter Marathon – the studio’s next big bet – has struggled to build a substantial playerbase despite positive critical reception, and reports of a potential PvE-only mode signal the team is still searching for the right hook.
Honestly, calling this a “new beginning” is doing a lot of heavy lifting for what is, in practice, the quiet death of a nine-year live service. Bungie built an audience that logged thousands of hours, invested in seasonal narratives, and bought expansion after expansion – and the studio’s final message to those players is essentially: the servers stay on, but we’re done. The corporate framing smooths over real tension here. Sony spent $3.6 billion to make Bungie its live service “center of excellence,” and what they got was a studio that missed revenue targets by a reported 45%, shed roughly 100 staff in late 2023, and is now winding down its flagship before its replacement is ready. The brutal economics of live service retention are unforgiving, and Destiny 2‘s decline is a case study in what happens when player trust erodes faster than a studio can rebuild it – between the controversial Content Vault, years of monetisation friction, and repeated promises that never quite landed.
What remains unclear is what “incubating our next games” actually means in practice. Bungie hasn’t confirmed whether Destiny 3 is in development or whether the studio is pivoting to an entirely new IP. Marathon is the only named project on the horizon, and its trajectory will be the first real test of whether Bungie still has the runway – and Sony‘s confidence – to mount a genuine comeback. The June 9th final update is the next concrete date on the calendar, and what that patch actually contains for returning players will signal how much goodwill Bungie is genuinely trying to preserve versus how much of this is managed decline dressed up in optimistic language.
Are you sad to see Destiny 2 lose active support after nearly a decade, or does a defined ending feel like the right call? And do you think Bungie can pull off a successful new start with Marathon or whatever comes next? Sound off in the comments below, and keep your eyes on GameLuster for more Bungie and live service gaming coverage.
