Sony purchased Bungie for $3.6 million back in 2022 on the eve of Destiny 2‘s best expansion ever. Just over four years later, the PlayStation 5 maker is recording a $560 million impairment cost for its fourth quarter of the 2025 fiscal year, which closed just four weeks after the launch of Marathon.
The company pointed to, “Recording of impairment losses against Bungie, Inc.’s intangible and other assets (Q2: 31.5 bln yen, Q4: 88.6 bln yen, FY25 total: 120.1 bln yen),” to explain the negative factors impacting its otherwise decent performance. Sony recorded a total of nearly $765 million lost for the entire year on the Bungie deal, with the possibility of additional losses from the acquisition in fiscal year 2026.
Marathon, Bungie’s first new franchise in over a decade, launched on March 5. Two months later, Sony still hasn’t confirmed sales numbers for the extraction shooter, let alone total player counts. Despite praise from fans and reviewers, Marathon has been unable to stay in the top-10 most played games each week on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, or PC.
It’s currently hovering between 10,000 and 15,000 concurrent players on Steam, the platform where it’s reportedly sold the majority of its copies thus far. While it can’t compare with the concurrent player numbers for Destiny 2 in the past, Bungie’s famous loot shooter has also seen better days. It’s currently at it’s lowest point ever on Steam.
Bungie has already undergone multiple rounds of mass layoffs following its acquisition by Sony and its previous CEO, Pete Parsons, was also replaced. Fans are once again expecting the worst as they await another potential round of cuts due to Bungie’s expensive overhead and the floundering of its two current live service blockbusters.
Marathon has continued to flirt with more casual-friendly modes to get newcomers to try the game out, but it’s hard to see the momentum of the multiplayer shooter shifting much in the short-term without more aggressive overtures from Sony.
Those might including cutting the game’s $40 price tag or implementing a free trial weekend, something diehard fans have asked for in the past.
