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.
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Destiny is their money maker IP, there's no way there won't be a Destiny 3.
@UltimateOtaku91 If they survive that long. If Marathon doesn't deliver, I wouldn't be surprised if that was the end of Bungie, as we know them.
@UltimateOtaku91
There should have been a Destiny 3, 4 or 5 years ago on a new engine which would have made making content slightly easier. Didn't they make a deal with Tencent or someone a while ago to make a game not heard anything about that since.
Bungie is like a dam that finally bursts, and all that spews forth is sewage.
When I read that headline my first thought was Marathon lol.
Still can’t work out how a studio of that size have not produced another big AAA game over the years since destiny 2. I know they have been supporting and adding to destiny 2.
But to me with the shear amount of employees they should have produced another big game by now easily.
Goes to show when you swell a business and don’t manage it, it ends up producing nothing even with lots of employees.
If they are scaling back D2 content next year as has been reported and they are not working on D3 then what are the remaining 850 Bungie staff working on. Besides finishing up the 2 remaining episodes this year and Marathon that is.
I'm not a Bugie devotee. Played base D2 but never played beyond that.
When I say I cannot WAIT to see what they do with Marathon... oh my. The look and feel of that teaser trailer just lit something inside of me. No shooter has an aesthetic close to it and I cannot wait to play it.
I want that game to be fun so badly. I think it looks (literally just looks) incredible. Something about the bright colors, blocky simplicity to the gun designs...
I wonder if Sony still consider Bungie to be the masters of live-service games. I mean sure Bungie made a popular live-service game, but you're supposed to be able to ride the revenue of that game, which Bungie failed to do. So did they just make a popular live-service game but absolutely fail to find a way to monitize it or fail to handle the revenue streams coming from it?
I think they will be waiting to see how Marathon lands, if it makes the money and is a hit, they'll pull focus to that and slowly wind down D2. If Marathon is a failure there'll be some kind of Destiny 3, there's just no way D2 can continue on with the current sub-par Episode strategy they are currently rolling with and with no big expansion planned for anytime soon, its hard to see how they keep it ticking along with everything going on at their studio
Thanks to Jason Schreier for giving us the facts rather than the initial report.
So.... Destiny 3 confirmed? Lol
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