Sony’s Bungie bet is looking pretty rough right now, bro.
According to Sony’s latest earnings, the PlayStation parent company recorded an 88.6 billion yen impairment loss — around $565 million — connected to Bungie, the studio behind Destiny 2 and the newly launched Marathon. That loss was included in Sony’s fourth quarter results, which ended on March 31, roughly four weeks after Marathon arrived on March 5.
For the full financial year, Sony’s impairment loss tied to Bungie reached 120.1 billion yen, or about $768 million. That is a massive number, especially when you remember Sony bought Bungie for $3.6 billion.
In normal human language, an impairment loss means Sony is admitting that part of Bungie’s value on paper is now worth less than expected. Sony CFO and corporate executive officer Lin Tao said Bungie’s game portfolio did not perform up to the company’s expectations, leading Sony to revise its business plan downward and write down the value of Bungie-related fixed assets, excluding goodwill.
The big focus here is Marathon. Bungie’s extraction shooter launched across PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X, but it has not exploded in the way Sony would have wanted from such an expensive studio purchase. On Steam, Marathon reached a peak of 77,358 concurrent players in its first month. These days, Steam Charts data puts it in the range of roughly 4,000 to 17,000 concurrent players.
For comparison, Destiny 2 once hit 316,651 concurrent players on Steam. That gap is gila big.
What makes the situation interesting is that Marathon does not seem to be a total quality disaster. Sony pointed out that the game has a Metacritic score of 82, while more than 90% of Steam player reviews are positive. Tao also said retention and other engagement metrics remain strong, which suggests the people who are into Marathon are really into it.
The problem is scale. A live-service multiplayer game cannot survive on good vibes from a small core community alone, especially when it comes from Bungie and sits under Sony’s big PlayStation strategy. It needs enough players to keep matchmaking healthy, content updates worthwhile, and the wider conversation alive.
For Malaysian and SEA players, this matters because live-service games live or die by momentum. If your squad is deciding whether to invest time into a new shooter, player population is not just a business metric — it affects queue times, regional matchmaking, content support, and whether the game still feels alive three months later. Nobody wants to grind a game only to see friends disappear because the wider player base never showed up.
Sony says it is not walking away from Marathon. The plan is to keep supporting engaged players with more content, gameplay improvements, and efforts to grow the audience. Bungie has already made one of Marathon’s better sponsored Cryo Archive kits available as a free weekly download, which feels like a small but clear move to keep players logging in.
Still, the bigger picture is hard to ignore. Sony bought Bungie expecting live-service expertise and long-term hits. Right now, Destiny 2 is no longer at its Steam peak, and Marathon has not yet become the mainstream breakout Sony probably wanted.
Marathon may still recover if Bungie can keep its core players happy and convince new players to jump in. But for now, Sony’s Bungie acquisition is looking like a much heavier carry than expected.
Source: Polygon