Destiny fans are still trying their damnedest to revive the franchise’s future, and the efforts are admirable and noticeable.
A fan petition pushing Sony to develop Destiny 3 with Bungie has now crossed over 400,000 signatures, which is notable enough for Change.org itself to take notice of it and post about it on social media.
And I’m sorry, but unfortunately, it won’t mean or change a damn thing.
I’m a day one Destiny player. I got hooked from the very first days of the Alpha test on PS4. I love Destiny, I love Destiny 2, and I pine for the days of the past when weekly raiding with friends, grinding Strikes for loot drops, and piling into the servers on day one of every expansion hoping to get new lore crumbs.
But it’s over. Not officially, but it’s certainly not looking good. Destiny 2’s live service period has ended. The game won’t be getting any more substantial updates. The powers that be at Bungie and PlayStation deemed that the game was not profitable enough, so the updates are ending. And Sony gutted the studio last month, laying off about half of its workforce and reassigning people to Marathon and other unknown projects, the latter of which I highly doubt is Destiny 3.
The manpower and money it would take to make a full-fledged Destiny sequel that everybody seemingly wants is apparently not worth it for Sony, which has undoubtedly lost money on its $3.6 billion acquisition of Bungie back in 2022 after Destiny’s revenue slowed and Marathon stumbled out of the gates.
It appears that Sony is giving Bungie a chance to turn things around with Marathon, get more people on the game, and start generating revenue to justify the studio’s operational costs. A new PvE mode is being tested right now, with a full-time release coming in September. It’s helped give a slight bump in daily players at first (on Steam), but it’s truly going to be a massively uphill battle to salvage things.
Destiny 3 is way more of a sure bet to generate money than Marathon ever was. Marathon, no matter how good it is, is a hardcore extraction shooter that doesn’t have widespread appeal the same way that Destiny does. And still, Sony persists.
I guess it’s possible that Destiny 3 is being worked up behind the scenes by a small team, but given the state of the industry and how big-budget games have sky-high sales expectations as it is, the probable reality of the situation at Bungie is much darker. And it makes me very sad to admit that.
