Bungie Confirms Mass Layoffs, Most of Destiny Team and Some Marathon Devs Hit as Sony's Hulst Calls Cuts 'Necessary'

Sony pulled the trigger. PlayStation Studios CEO Hermen Hulst confirmed mass layoffs at Bungie on the afternoon of June 25, 2026, with the cuts landing hardest on the studio's flagship franchise. A 'significant' number of employees are being let go, including most of the Destiny team and a chunk of the Marathon team, plus supporting SIE staff who keep the studio wired together. The memo, posted to Sony's official SIE blog, is a cold, corporate-thorough summary of what players have been dreading since Bungie shipped Destiny 2's final live-service content update and the Marathon extraction shooter launched to a polite reception in March.

Hulst's wording is careful but unambiguous. 'We have made the decision to reduce Bungie's workforce, affecting a significant number of employees, including most of the Destiny team and some Marathon team members,' the memo reads, before going on to note 'reductions across SIE teams that support Bungie's operations.' Affected staff are being told today, June 25. Hulst frames the move as a reset: 'We explored multiple alternatives before concluding that a reduction was necessary to align the studio's resources with its current priorities and long-term goals.' Translation for anyone who has watched a publisher make this speech before: the post-launch runway ran out, the spreadsheets said cut, and the spreadsheet won.

The Marathon Bet

Marathon, Bungie's first major new IP since 2014's Destiny, is the casualty that hurts most. The extraction shooter launched on Steam on March 5, 2026, to a 'Mostly Positive' recent review average across 3,484 user reviews, and Sony clearly saw it as a Halo-meets-Tarkov flag-plant for the studio. The game is being explicitly spared the worst of the cuts. Hulst called Marathon 'an important part of our portfolio' and said Sony will 'continue to support the team as they build on the strong foundation established in Season 1 and 2, and as they work on incubation efforts for future projects.' Season 2 is the Vault Breaker PVE mode the studio just locked in for a July 21 release, with exfil loot-stays-behind stakes. That roadmap now ships with a smaller crew than the one that built it.

The Bungie Bill

The layoff math is brutal in context. Sony paid $3.6 billion for Bungie in 2022, the most expensive acquisition in PlayStation history at the time, on the promise of a Destiny 2 live-service engine and a steady drip of new IP. Four years later, the company is cutting 'most' of the team that built the thing it bought Bungie for in the first place, while trimming the team behind the new game Sony was counting on. Bungie already absorbed one major round of layoffs in late 2023, dropped the original Marathon pitch after a long development slog, and watched the Destiny 2 player base slowly erode as the live-service pipeline ran dry. Steam logged around 65,000 concurrent Destiny 2 players the day of the news. Marathon sits under 5,000.

The studio's own statement, mirrored on its official channels, leans on the same 'necessary to align resources' language Hulst used. It also thanks the affected employees and reminds everyone reading that Destiny 2's final live-service content update has shipped, and that Bungie's future projects are still 'in early incubation.' That is corporate for: we are not announcing a Destiny 3 today, we are not announcing whatever came after Marathon, and we are very aware that those two sentences in a row sound like a eulogy.

The Community Reads the Room

The reactions on X in the hours after the memo dropped match what you would expect. Shinobi602, the long-time Bungie whisperer, broke the story first at 14:40 UTC, calling it a 'significant' number and pointing out the Marathon and Destiny overlap. Tom Warren, Tom Henderson, and Mike Straw all confirmed and added detail. Insider Gaming published the full memo, and Wario64 (despite the day, the man still had the link up within minutes) pushed traffic to the SIE blog post. Novers, a former Bungie community figure, posted a short goodbye: 'The final nail in the coffin. Thank you to everyone at Bungie for 12 years of incredible memories. I owe so much to this game and community.' That post got two likes and fifty views. Sometimes the smallest numbers carry the most weight.

Destiny 2 fans, who have been bracing for this for a year, reacted with a mix of exhaustion and dark humor. The Circuitry called it 'Bungie starts layoffs after Destiny 2 finale. Studio says it cannot maintain previous size despite Marathon updates planned through 2026; future projects still in early stages.' Pixel Operative pointed out the obvious 65K-to-5K player ratio with a 'WTF.' J.C. put the human cost front and center: 'The devs impacted by layoffs now and before deserved better than this. Destiny deserved better than its fate. When you prioritize numbers and metrics over people, creativity, and art, this is all that remains...nothing and no one.' Mike Zero's joke was the meanest and probably the truest: 'How it feels to comment make Destiny 3 to Bungie after hearing about the layoffs.'

The Sony Math Problem

Sony's games division has been bleeding talent for a year. The Craig Duncan exit as head of Xbox Game Studios was the headline moment across the aisle, but on the PlayStation side, Firewalk Studios, the maker of Concord, was shut down entirely in 2024. London Studio was closed. Firesprite shipped a budget Horizon spin-off and lost staff. PlayStation killed its single-player PC ports program and is now watching Marathon, its extraction shooter bet, run on a skeleton crew. The pattern is not a coincidence. Sony paid a premium for Bungie, watched the original thesis fail, kept paying salaries for two years to push out a Destiny 2 finale and a new live-service game, and is now harvesting the difference. Players call it a tragedy. To Sony's CFO it is a line item.

CriticalPixel Take

Here is the part that should make everyone in the industry uncomfortable. Marathon, in its current Season 2 form, is the game Hulst just promised to keep shipping. It launched less than four months ago. The extraction shooter genre is a graveyard of games that bled players after month two: Dark and Darker, The Cycle Frontier, the worst Hunt Showdown patches, and on. Marathon's sub-5,000 concurrent number is the kind of metric that gets a live-service game pulled, not trimmed. Sony choosing to keep it running while laying off 'most' of the Destiny team and 'some' Marathon staff is, on its face, an admission that the bet did not pay and a quiet decision to keep it on life support while extracting whatever brand value the name still carries. That is not a strategy. That is a controlled shutdown you get to keep calling a season.

Destiny 2's final live-service content update shipped a few weeks ago. Marathon's Season 2 drops July 21 with Vault Breaker. Sony says 'future projects' at Bungie are in 'early incubation.' The developers who got cut today built a generation of live-service shooter. They built the Halo sequel that defined a console generation. They built the live-service loot shooter that defined a genre. The next studio to poach them will pay less and ship more, and Sony will write this layoff round off as a 'reset' on a quarterly earnings call. The rest of us will be reading the credits of Marathon Season 3 in 2027 and trying to remember which old Bungie devs are still on the byline.