Bungie, the Bellevue, Wash.-based video game studio behind Destiny and Marathon, began its week with an apology from its new studio head, as it tries to win back its audience after several recent missteps.
On Monday morning, in a blog post and video entitled “The Next Chapter for Bungie,” new studio head Poria Torkan and Josh Deane, Bungie’s head of product, directly addressed Bungie’s community regarding its extraction shooter Marathon and the future of the Destiny franchise.
“For more than 30 years, Bungie has built these amazing worlds, and communities have been formed around them,” Torkan said in the video. “Over the last few years, we lost sight of that. The consequences have been real. We lost trust. We lost incredible colleagues. And our ambitions as a studio stalled.”
Almost three years ago, Bungie’s star was on a meteoric rise. Sony had acquired the studio in a deal valued at $3.6 billion, completed in July 2022. Destiny 2 was one of the most popular games-as-a-service on the modern market, which led to talks of expansion.
Much like the rest of the Western games industry, however, Bungie subsequently implemented multiple waves of layoffs, the most recent of which, in June, it described online as “a reduction in force as we reorganize.” At least 290 employees were dismissed from Bungie in June.
June also marked the departure of studio head Justin Truman, who’d replaced outgoing head Pete Parsons in 2025, and what was reported to be the end of development on Destiny 2.
If you’d asked an industry analyst what would happen to Bungie in July, the most likely answer was that it would be either turned into a support studio for other developers in the PlayStation network or shut down entirely. Instead, Torkan and Deane, as Bungie’s new leadership team, appear to be on an apology tour.
“We’re not asking for your trust,” Torkan said. “We know we have to earn it, and to do that, we need our games to deliver in ways that exceed your expectations of what you’ve come to love about the games that we make.”
The first step along that road is, according to Torkan, raiding Destiny 2’s infamous “content vault.”
Starting in 2020, three years into Destiny 2’s run, Bungie would routinely remove older parts of the game from the live service, such as its launch campaign and several early raids.
In theory, this was to make the client easier for Bungie to update, since it only had to focus on the newest parts of Destiny 2. In practice, this was like deleting the first episodes of a TV show to “make room” whenever a new one came out. If a player hadn’t been keeping up with D2 from the beginning, it was difficult to figure out what was actually going on in-game without a wiki dive or lore video.
Further, if a player wanted to go back and re-play those earlier parts of Destiny 2, they couldn’t. The first third or so of D2, despite being part of a live-service game, was effectively lost media. According to Torkan and Deane, Bungie is now working to bring back that “vaulted” content to the modern version of Destiny 2.
In addition, while neither Torkan nor Deane actually used the phrase “Destiny 3,” Torkan did say that Bungie is “absolutely not done with Destiny.” Their first priority, however, is remaking and restoring the lost levels in Destiny 2.
“That restoration will hopefully lay the foundation for how we reforge new Destiny stories and games that you all deserve and that we want to create,” Deane said.
Bungie also hasn’t given up on its extraction shooter Marathon, which released earlier this year to a surprisingly positive critical reception.
While Bungie had already announced plans for the future of Marathon, Deane, the game’s general manager, said today that Marathon will continue to evolve into a “deeper survival experience,” with more agency for players in both PvE and PvP modes.
A consistent thread throughout both the video and post, however, was a focus on Bungie’s audience and fan community.
“How we build this new Bungie… has to be through the spirit of putting players above everything else,” Deane said. “We have to find a way back to making games that we want to play, but with you at the center. We have to meet you where you are, build what you want, and reforge our creative soul to prove that Bungie is still capable of building worlds that are part of your life, your time, your stories, and most importantly, your communities.”
“We need to restore Destiny to a place you can call home again,” Deane continued. “Evolve Marathon for more of you to enjoy and to create a new inspiring future for Bungie no matter what.”
“We’ve made commitments like these before,” Torkan said. “We understand the skepticism. We spent too much time trying to do too much, and that came at a real cost.”
