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Major updates for Destiny 2 are now officially over, but the game and Bungie in its entirety were allegedly close to shutting down for good years earlier. According to a former community lead who used to work at the storied Destiny developer, Sony's $3.6 billion buyout was the corporate equivalent of deploying a parachute seconds before hitting the ground.
"Bungie was below the red line before the Sony acquisition," ex-community manager, Liana Ruppert, claims on social media. "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."
The Destiny and Marathon maker had split from its ex-publishing partner Activision a few years before its eventual 2022 acquisition, and I imagine self-publishing an MMO that grand and expansive wasn't a cheap undertaking. However, Bungie being in such scorching hot water at the time is somewhat surprising.
Destiny 2: Beyond Light, the expansion that preceded Sony's acquisition, was seemingly a huge boon for the game, and pre-orders for its next expansion, The Witch Queen, hit record highs. Player counts were also more or less consistent at the time, as well – or, at least, they were in comparison to how the game's been performing recently – according to SteamDB.
"Big shakeups are happening in the tech and gaming space – I'm not going to say what I think is going to happen because it really doesn't matter what I think to be honest, but I still see the community from the CM lens and the Marathon community is eating good," Ruppert adds. "Just remember how everything caught you by surprise, it's a humble reminder that the public really does have no idea what's going on (this applies to all studios).
"As somebody that knows exactly how that struggle can be the best thing you can do is support the studio in a way that feels good for you and learn tools to help you catch yourself when you feel like you're getting a little in the heavy side of thinking about things that you can't see or control so you don't kill the player passion inside of you. We have a lot of players that the passion died and they kept only going because it was feasible to do so, but passionless discourse is just noise."
Sony gave the iconic hit maker independence for a while post-acquisition, seemingly in the hopes that Bungie could help the publisher push out more live-service success stories. The company seemed a bit cooler on Bungie a couple of years after, and has more recently reported a $765 million impairment loss on the studio in the last financial year following its Marathon launch.
Bungie is now apparently in the process of pitching a new game with no Destiny 3 in sight and layoffs planned, according to a Bloomberg report. Here's hoping the affected staff can land on their feet – especially since Destiny 2's final update has been a home run.
