Bungie currently has no plans to work on a Destiny 3, according to a new report by Bloomberg. While new Destiny projects could happen at some point, there’s no indication that Sony plans to greenlight an expensive sequel anytime soon.
In fact, Bungie doesn’t have any new project immediately lined up right now, even as another round of significant layoffs looms with the conclusion of Destiny 2‘s content updates in June. While post-launch work on Marathon will continue, the rest of the studio will focus on incubating new projects until one of them gets the go-ahead from Sony.
Fans will be disappointed that Bungie hasn’t already been laying the groundwork for a Destiny 3. A new sequel in an overhauled engine that reboots the sci-fi adventure with a new epic story arc is something fans have wanted since at least The Final Shape in 2024, but in some cases even longer than that.
Anytime Destiny 2 has made controversial changes in the past, or experienced periods of malaise among the fanbase, calls for Destiny 3 would start perennially trending on social media and the subreddit. There was a belief that the only way to overcome major design hurdles, or reignite the passion and imagination of long-time players, was with a completely new game.
Destiny 2 came out just three years after Destiny 1. The quick turnaround sequel was controversial in its own right. It was published by Activision at the time, whose military shooter Call of Duty printed money with annual installments. But having tons of studios grind out new content for a living MMO proved far from sustainable for the developers crunching and a player-base still reeling from losing all of their hard-earned gear in the jump from D1 to D2.
Over the long run, Bungie proved the advantages of a live-service, seasonal format that bolstered annual expansions with smaller updates throughout the year. Destiny 2 was soaring around the time of The Witch Queen, arguably the game’s post-Forsaken peak in terms of the quality of content and the renewed passion among fans.
That also happened to be the same time that Sony acquired Bungie, and we know how things have gone since then. There’s plenty to debate about why Destiny 2 got worse from there, and how much of that was inevitable versus the result of poor design choices and misplaced creative bets. But when the going gets tough, Destiny fans inevitably pine for the promise of a clean slate. They dream of a sequel. They hope for Destiny 3.
The fact that, throughout all of this time, Bungie hasn’t quietly been toiling away on plans for Destiny‘s future, might leave some fans feeling shocked and confused. But it’s not hard to understand from a financial perspective. Sequels are expensive. They take a long time. Development is rocky and uncertain. So many resources go into simply trying to recreate what already was.
And after so many recent failed live-service bets by Sony, how would you convince the PlayStation 5 maker to make its biggest investment yet in the sequel to a game that’s already facing year-over-year declines in popularity? The initial price of Destiny 1 was $140 million. The napkin math of doubling AAA blockbuster budgets every console generation would put the potential starting cost of a Destiny 3 at $560 million. All for a franchise most of my friends have long ago sworn off ever getting tricked into playing ever again.
The whole point of a live-service game is to avoid those spices in uncertainty. Instead of big investments in the hopes of future payoffs, you have teams working through established pipelines to keep making new stuff for what’s already working. That’s been a lucrative model for lots of game studios. It seemed to be very lucrative for Bungie for years, too. Lucrative enough that Sony was convinced to pay $3.6 billion for the studio.
That doesn’t mean Destiny 3 could never happen. It’s hard to see how Sony ever justifies that massive sale price without an eventual Destiny 3. But the current cross-roads might also be an opportunity for Bungie to redefine itself in the wake of a 12-year project that completely transformed it. “As our focus turns towards a new beginning for Bungie, we will begin work incubating our next games,” the studio wrote in its blog post this week.
The studio is once again facing harsh layoffs, but those who remain will hopefully have a chance to create something completely new, even if it’s smaller in scale and more humble than the types of games fans have become accustomed to seeing out of Bungie. Destiny has nearly destroyed Bungie. I wouldn’t want to see work on a Destiny 3 potentially finish the job.
