What Sony cut at Bungie, and how
Sony Interactive Entertainment is cutting 292 jobs at Bungie, the Bellevue, Washington studio behind Destiny 2 and the unreleased Marathon. A WARN filing with Washington State's Employment Security Department shows staff were notified on 25 June 2026 with a last day of 9 July 2026, per GeekWire's report on the filing. Studio Business Group CEO Hermen Hulst framed the cuts, in an internal email, as the result of months of review of Bungie's direction and its role in Sony's portfolio, landing on most of the Destiny team plus some Marathon staff.
The numbers are stark. Bungie's headcount peaked near 1,300 a few years ago; these cuts could push it to roughly 500 or fewer, about a third of its size when Sony bought Bungie for 3.6 billion dollars, roughly 3.4 billion euros, in 2022. Reports cite a writedown of about 765 million dollars tied to Bungie and Marathon. There is also a timing question raised in Forbes analysis: the last day of 9 July falls six days before the four-year acquisition anniversary on 15 July, inviting questions about acquisition-related grant vesting.
The live-service model reaching its limit
Step back from one studio and a pattern appears. Global games content revenue hit a record near 195.6 billion dollars in 2025, yet private investment in gaming fell about 55 percent that same year. The industry is making more money while employing fewer of the people who actually build the games, and that paradox is the real headline.
The retrenchment is concentrated in live-service games: single perpetual online titles like Destiny 2, engineered to be played and monetised for years. When that one title stalls, there is no second engine to carry the studio. This is not a story about one team failing to execute; it is a business model reaching the edge of what a single perpetual game can safely underwrite.
What European studio owners should take from it
For European studio owners and their investors, the lesson is structural, not sentimental. Studios in the UK and France carry the same live-service concentration, and a company betting its future on one perpetual online game holds a single-point-of-failure risk its balance sheet never shows. Record revenue at the industry level does nothing to soften that exposure for the individual owner.
The hedge is a diversified pipeline, not a bigger live-service bet. That means a portfolio of titles across formats and revenue models, staggered so no single release date decides the year, and a cost base that can flex before a writedown forces the decision. Owners who plan for that now keep the choice in their own hands rather than in a parent company's quarterly review.
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