A Big Bungie Project Has Been Cancelled, But It Wasn't Destiny 3 1

There’s turmoil at developer Bungie following another brutal round of lay offs which saw over 200 employees let go, and a further 150 or so reallocated roles within parent company Sony. Speaking about the drama on his Game Mess Mornings podcast this week, snoopster Jeff Grubb said that a major new project named Payback had been shelved as a result. Some fans suspect this game may have been Destiny 3, although it’s never been confirmed as such.

Following up on the speculation, Bloomberg journalist Jason Schreier elaborated that Payback had actually been cancelled prior to the latest round of redundancies, and it was never Destiny 3 to begin with. "Destiny 3 was not cancelled because it was never in development, per people familiar,” he wrote on X (or Twitter). “Bungie did some very early work on a spinoff project called Payback, but they cancelled that a while ago.”

It sounds like development on Destiny 2 will continue, with future expansions likely to be smaller in scale, as hypothesised by Grubb. Meanwhile, work continues in earnest on Marathon, the reboot of the developer’s first-person shooter franchise, which first debuted on the Apple Macintosh approximately 30 years ago.

[source twitch.tv, via x.com]