Bungie Was ‘Below the Red Line’ Before Sony’s Buyout, Ex-CM Says

Bungie’s former community manager says Sony’s $3.6 billion buyout of the studio was an emergency rescue from imminent shutdown, and that supporting Marathon is now the only way to keep the studio alive. Liana Ruppert, posting on X this week, framed the deal as the thing that kept Bungie from shutting its doors and pushed back on the framing that Sony’s ownership caused Destiny 2’s end.

The pushback comes as Marathon, Bungie’s new extraction shooter, sits well below Destiny 2’s recent player count. Ruppert’s argument is that the two games were never built for the same audience, and that the comparison fans keep making is the wrong one.

Bungie Was ‘Below the Red Line’ Before Sony Showed Up

Liana Ruppert has spent the week pushing back against the dominant narrative about Bungie’s last few years. In a post on X, the former community manager framed Sony’s 2022 acquisition as the only thing that kept the studio’s doors open. The post landed as Bungie shipped what it calls the final live update for Destiny 2.

“Bungie was below the red line before the Sony acquisition. If it wasn’t acquired right then, the studio was very close to shutting its doors at the very least on Destiny. It was an emergency acquisition,” Ruppert wrote in a post on the emergency acquisition, responding to a fan who suggested Sony should have given Destiny 2 more time. PC Gamer reported that Bungie was in a pickle long before the 2022 deal closed. The studio had split from Activision in 2019 to self-publish, and the years since brought content shakeups, microtransaction overhauls, and a slow player decline that had already pushed Bungie to look for a buyer.

The framing cuts against a fan campaign that has spammed recent showcases, including Sony’s own State of Play, with demands for a Destiny 3. Bloomberg has reported that a new Destiny game is not in active development. Ruppert’s post is a counter-narrative: that Bungie was already wounded when Sony arrived, and the acquisition is what bought it time.

The $766 Million Impairment Loss Tells the Other Half

Sony’s $3.6 billion bet on Bungie has not paid off the way the company hoped. The Japanese conglomerate recorded a $766 million impairment loss against the studio for the 2025 financial year, a write-down PC Gamer said reflected both Destiny 2 and Marathon missing their expectations. The impairment captures the gap between what Sony paid for the studio and what its remaining business is now judged to be worth. The number was disclosed last month, with Destiny 2’s player count well below its 2024 peak. PC Gamer also noted that the studio had been hunting for a new partner to keep the ship afloat in the years before the deal closed.

The buyout, completed in 2022, was supposed to give Sony a foothold in live service and give Bungie a backstop for the volatility of running a single live game. Both halves of that arrangement have struggled. Bungie has watched Destiny 2’s player base collapse from 314,000 concurrent Steam players at the 2024 The Final Shape expansion to sub-10,000 peaks earlier in 2026, according to Forbes. A significant new round of cuts, per Bloomberg, is being framed as part of the Destiny 2 wind-down.

By the Numbers

• $3.6 billion: Sony’s acquisition price for Bungie, completed in 2022
• $766 million: Sony’s impairment loss against Bungie for the 2025 financial year
• 88,337: Marathon’s all-time peak concurrent players on Steam, set March 6, 2026
• 167,000: Destiny 2’s 24-hour Steam peak on the day of its final live update, June 9, 2026

Marathon’s Player Count Was Never Going to Match Destiny’s

Marathon launched on March 5, 2026, and topped out at 88,337 concurrent players on Steam by the end of its first day. The figure, logged on Marathon’s live player counts and detailed in coverage of Marathon’s day one player count, marked the high-water mark for Bungie’s new extraction shooter. Marathon’s live concurrent count, per SteamDB, had dropped to 10,929 by the platform’s last record update on May 27, 2026.

Fans have been comparing Marathon’s launch peak to Destiny 2’s numbers ever since. The comparison is the one Ruppert is most eager to retire. Marathon is a $40 paid extraction shooter built for a Tarkov-sized audience, not the 24/7 MMO-shaped crowd that powered Destiny 2’s 2024 expansion peak. Bungie, in her telling, was upfront about that scope from the start.

The two games were never going to live in the same bracket, and the data shows it. Marathon’s launch drew the kind of numbers that fit its scope, not the ones fans were projecting onto it.

Ruppert Says Marathon Was Built for a Tarkov Crowd

Ruppert spent part of the week correcting the Marathon-versus-Destiny comparison directly. In a follow-up post on supporting Marathon, she argued that Marathon was designed to compete in the extraction shooter market, not the looter shooter one. “The only way to keep Bungie alive right now is to support Marathon,” she wrote. “It’s more aligned with Tarkov than Destiny.”

Escape from Tarkov is a smaller and more punishing niche product than Destiny 2, and it draws a different crowd that tolerates lower concurrency. Marathon was priced and scoped for that bracket, Ruppert said, with internal targets far below the audience size of a Bungie MMO. “Completely different target markets that just so happen to have a wide intersection with Destiny target markets since it uniquely has so many,” she added.

Half the community is going to hate me for saying this, but the only way to keep Bungie alive right now is to support Marathon.

Liana Ruppert, Bungie’s former community manager, posted the line on X in a thread responding to the player count comparisons between the two games. The follow-up post positions Marathon as a focused product and asks fans to judge it on its own terms.

She also pushed back on the framing that Marathon’s launch peak was a flop. The 88,337 figure is a respectable opening for a paid extraction shooter in 2026, and Bungie’s internal targets were lower than the Destiny-shaped numbers fans were projecting onto it. Ruppert argued that Marathon was hitting the bar it was set for, even if that bar is not the same as Destiny 2’s. The argument is part of a broader case that Bungie needs Marathon to succeed as a smaller game in order to keep the studio solvent. “This fight was pre-Sony,” Ruppert wrote in her earlier post, putting Bungie’s current struggles in the context of the studio’s pre-Sony troubles.

Destiny 2’s Final Update Drew Its Biggest Crowd in Two Years

The contrast between Marathon and Destiny 2 came into sharp focus on June 9, 2026, when Bungie shipped the final live update for its looter shooter. The game’s 24-hour concurrent player count on Steam peaked at 167,000, the highest figure Destiny 2 had seen since the 2024 launch of its The Final Shape expansion, which peaked at 314,000. The new peak arrived after Bungie had spent months signaling that the support era for Destiny 2 was ending.

Some players reported trouble logging in as the surge hit in the middle of a US workday. The campaign to push the concurrent count past Marathon’s all-time peak had been coordinated on social media in the days before the update, with fans explicitly hoping to crash the servers as a statement of support for the franchise. The 167,000 figure blew past Marathon’s 88,337 launch peak and gave the farewell update an edge of protest, a point detailed in our look at Destiny 2’s final update player surge. The whole surge landed in the middle of a US workday, per the same IGN report on the final update.

Bungie Now Has One Game to Bet On

Bungie is now focused on Marathon as its only major project. The studio is preparing a significant new wave of layoffs, per Bloomberg’s reporting, with the cuts tied to the wind-down of Destiny 2 development. A new Destiny game is not in active development, the same report said, leaving Marathon as the studio’s remaining flagship.

The refocusing follows years of cost cuts and project cancellations that have left Marathon as Bungie’s only release since the 2022 acquisition. The studio has tested Marathon with a free week and the launch of Season 2: Nightfall, both moves aimed at broadening the player base after the underwhelming launch, as covered in our look at Marathon’s Season 2 free week test. Marathon now has the staff, the runway, and the studio’s full attention, the same trifecta Destiny 2 once had at Bungie. The question is whether the smaller, Tarkov-shaped audience Ruppert described can support all of it.

For now, Ruppert’s argument is the only road map on offer. If Marathon’s small but loyal audience keeps the studio solvent, she wrote, a future Bungie is still possible. If it does not, the studio faces the same closure that drove the 2022 buyout, the alternative her first post called an emergency.