Bloomberg's Jason Schreier dropped the line that flipped a quiet Bungie news week into a five-alarm one. In a May 21 report, Schreier said Sony's Bungie unit is planning a "significant" round of layoffs once the June 9 Destiny 2 update - the recently re-titled Monument of Triumph patch - ships and closes out active development on the live-service shooter. Schreier's sources framed the cuts as tied directly to the wind-down of the Destiny 2 development team, with no greenlit project ready to absorb the displaced staff.
The June 9 update is the one Bungie originally pitched as Shadow & Order, a March-targeted seasonal beat that the studio quietly rescoped and renamed Monument of Triumph after the project's scope ballooned. Bungie's own May 21 blog post - the one that triggered Schreier's reporting - framed Monument of Triumph as a celebratory capstone, calling it the final content update for Destiny 2 rather than the start of a hiatus. The framing matters because Destiny 2 has launched a steady cadence of mid-season patches since its 2017 release, including ten expansions through Renegades, which shipped in December 2025 as the tenth and final paid expansion.
Destiny 3 is the obvious follow-up question, and Schreier's sources told Bloomberg there is no Destiny 3 in production. Developers inside the studio are still pitching ideas for follow-up projects in the franchise, but Sony Interactive Entertainment has not greenlit any specific new Destiny title. That tracks with the financial state of the studio - Sony's earnings filings recorded a $565 million impairment against Bungie's assets in Q4 of fiscal year 2025, layered on top of a $201 million Q2 write-down. The combined $766 million in single-year write-offs against Bungie is one of the largest impairment runs against a single Sony first-party studio on record.
The pivot Schreier flagged is toward Marathon, the Bungie-developed extraction shooter that launched earlier in 2026. Marathon underperformed its initial sales and player-count targets - the game has been a structural problem child since its closed-alpha PR cycle exposed art-asset issues - but Bungie's executive team reportedly still believes it can grow into a stable live service over a multi-year window. Schreier's report says the studio is shifting senior Destiny staff onto Marathon support to backfill the title's content cadence, while smaller incubation teams pitch new concepts to SIE under the existing first-party framework.
The layoffs themselves are not yet officially confirmed by Bungie, and the studio has not commented on Bloomberg's reporting. But Schreier's track record on Bungie staffing decisions is well established - he broke the 2023 round of cuts that took out roughly 100 staff and the 2024 220-person round that consolidated Bungie under tighter SIE oversight. If the May 2026 cuts land at the scale Schreier's sources are suggesting, this would be Bungie's third headcount reduction in three calendar years, and the first tied explicitly to a major IP wind-down rather than a missed financial target.
