Former Bungie community manager Liana “DirtyEffinHippy” Ruppert has said the studio was “below the red line” before Sony bought it in 2022, describing the roughly $3.6 billion deal as an “emergency acquisition” that kept Destiny alive. Writing on X this week, Ruppert pushed back on fans blaming Sony for Destiny 2’s end, arguing the studio’s troubles ran far deeper and predated PlayStation ownership entirely.
Her comments land as Destiny 2 sits in stasis following its final content update on 9 June, with Bungie’s future now tied to the performance of its extraction shooter Marathon.
“This Fight Was Pre-Sony,” Ruppert Says
Ruppert’s remarks came in response to a fan who suggested Sony should have given Destiny 2 more of a chance. “This fight was pre-Sony,” she wrote. “Bungie was below the red line before the Sony acquisition. If it wasn’t acquired right then, the studio was very close to shutting its doors at the very least on Destiny. It was an emergency acquisition.”
Ruppert worked as a community manager at Bungie, focusing in part on accessibility, before being let go in October 2023 as part of a studio-wide round of layoffs. She has spoken out repeatedly since, previously placing the blame for Destiny’s funding problems on leadership “greed” rather than on Marathon or Sony.
How Bungie Got Here
Bungie split from publisher Activision in 2019 to self-publish Destiny 2, taking on the full cost of running the looter shooter itself. The game struggled at launch and built its audience slowly over the years, but a declining playerbase, repeated shake-ups to content delivery, microtransactions, and pricing, and rounds of layoffs left the studio searching for a partner to stay afloat. Sony bought Bungie for roughly $3.6 billion in 2022.
The deal has not gone the way either party hoped. Last month, Sony recorded a $766 million impairment loss against Bungie for the 2025 financial year, tied to both Destiny 2 and Marathon falling short of expectations. Reporting around Sony’s financials also pointed to a separate $565 million impairment figure attached to the studio. Bungie was initially given wide creative freedom under PlayStation, but that independence has tightened over the past year as the studio has been folded further into PlayStation Studios.
Destiny 2 Ends As Fans Push For Destiny 3
Bungie announced in late May that Destiny 2 would stop receiving new content, shipping a final Monument of Triumph update on 9 June before moving into maintenance mode. The send-off drove a spike in players: Destiny 2 peaked at 167,000 concurrent players on Steam, its only platform with public stats, around the final update, with smaller spikes of over 100,000 in the days since, roughly triple its recent monthly averages.
Fans have not gone quietly. A Change.org petition asking Sony to greenlight Destiny 3 has gathered upwards of 400,000 signatures, and players have flooded the live chats of recent online showcases, including Sony’s own State of Play, demanding the sequel. A third Destiny looks unlikely in the current development climate, and would be years from launch even if work started today.
Why Ruppert Says Marathon Matters
Rather than call for a new game immediately, Ruppert argued the surest way to keep Bungie alive long enough to make a Destiny 3 someday is to back Marathon now. “Half the community is going to hate me for saying this, but the only way to keep Bungie alive right now is to support Marathon,” she wrote, calling comparisons between Marathon’s and Destiny’s player counts “ignorant.” Marathon, she said, was never designed to match Destiny 2’s numbers and sits closer to extraction shooter Escape from Tarkov, targeting a smaller but loyal niche that happens to overlap heavily with Destiny’s audience.
The numbers reflect that gap. Marathon, which debuted in March, hit an all-time Steam peak of 77,358 players at launch but a 24-hour peak of under 16,000, typically a fraction of Destiny 2’s count. Both figures are Steam-only snapshots, with PlayStation and Xbox concurrents kept private. Ruppert maintained Marathon is “actually performing within expected perimeters” from the conversations she was part of, describing it as scratching “a small but VERY loyal niche” with “a beyond killer team” behind it.
What Happens Next
Bungie has given no indication it will revisit the decision to wind down Destiny 2, which was quietly made months ago, even amid the fan outcry. The studio remains focused on Marathon as fears of further layoffs linger. With Destiny 2 now in maintenance mode and no Destiny 3 confirmed, the studio’s next move hinges on whether Marathon can hold the loyal audience Ruppert says it was built for.