Bungie is trying to hit the reset button. In a video and blog post titled “The Next Chapter for Bungie” published September 21, the studio’s new leadership admitted the past few years have done real damage — and laid out a plan to win players back, starting with bringing vaulted Destiny 2 content back from the dead.
“We Lost Trust, We Lost Incredible Colleagues”
“Over the last few years, we lost sight of that, and there have been real consequences,” studio head Poria Torkan and head of product Josh Deane wrote. “We lost trust, we lost incredible colleagues, and we lost sight of what we should be prioritizing most, our players.” The pair were blunt that an apology alone won’t fix things: “We are not asking you to trust what we say today. We know that trust must be earned through the quality of our games, the decisions we make, and how consistently we show up for our players.”
Vaulted Destiny 2 Campaigns Are Coming Back
The first concrete change: Bungie will start un-vaulting Destiny 2’s older campaigns, locations and raids, with all players getting access in the coming months. The studio says it still needs to tweak lighting, combat encounters and other systems so that “returning content meets the stability and gameplay standards of Destiny 2 today.” Kotaku reports that includes the original Red War campaign — content players have been locked out of for more than six years.
“Destiny is foundational to Bungie’s future,” the studio added. “We have more stories to tell, new worlds to build, but we have to do it right and give our teams the time they need to do justice to this amazing universe. All of this is to say, we are not done with Destiny.” Notably, that is not a Destiny 3 announcement: Bungie has no new games to reveal right now, and earlier this year reports claimed there were no Destiny-related projects in active development, Destiny 3 included.
Marathon “Did Not Reach as Many Players as We Had Hoped”
The leadership team also addressed Marathon, the stylish extraction shooter that launched earlier this year. It “did not reach as many players as we had hoped, and we also know and understand that the game needs to evolve” — including evolving “beyond the genre constraints we placed on it.” The previously revealed permanent PvE mode and social space arrive in December, aimed at broadening the game’s appeal beyond players who only want risk-it-all competitive extraction runs.
How Bungie Got Here
The reset talk is grounded in a rough stretch. Sony purchased Bungie for $3.6 billion at the peak of the pandemic gaming boom, and the years since have brought reported revenue shortfalls and repeated mass layoffs — including at least 290 employees cut earlier this year, shortly after Destiny 2 received its final content update. The Final Shape expansion, which capped off more than a decade of storytelling, was a genuine bright spot; Marathon has struggled to fill the gap in the six months since launch. Whether this reset earns back player trust — early community reaction has leaned toward cautious optimism — remains to be seen.