Bungie’s value keeps on dropping in latest Sony financials
by Stefan L · tsaDestiny and Marathon developer Bungie is continuing to drop in value, as Sony has announced significant impairment losses for the company in this past quarter.
In this most recent quarter, ending on 31st March, Sony has noted “impairment losses against Bungie, Inc.’s intangible and other assets” of 88.6 billion yen (around $565 million USD). This comes after a previous loss in Q2 to now total a drop of 120.1 billion yen (around $765 million USD) in the past year.
This statement comes as Bungie is at a low ebb. Destiny 2 player counts have continued to slide since 2024’s The Final Shape expansion, while the recently released Marathon has only achieved a relatively niche playerbase, short of expectations. The prior impairment loss came in November, with Sony stating “level of sales and user engagement [of Destiny 2] have not reached the expectation [it] had at the time of the acquisition of Bungie.”
Instead of straight up revenues and expenditures, the impairment losses are a way of accounting for the value of Bungie as one of Sony’s assets. Having bought the company for $3.6 billion in July 2022, that’s a massive drop in Sony’s valuation of Bungie. It’s potentially even an even bigger drop when you consider that around $1.2 billion of that was to be used for retention incentives for the studio’s staff. It was already thought to be a significant overspend for the company, but was made around the time that Microsoft were sending dump trucks of money to acquire Activision for their massive multiplayer franchises, and PlayStation’s prior leadership under Jim Ryan were chasing the the holy grail of live service gaming (and largely failing). Bungie were viewed as a response to both driving forces.
Of course, Bungie has, much like the rest of the games industry, been subject to several rounds of layoffs. Having been acquired with a headcount of around 1,600 employees, layoffs through 2023 and 2024 saw the studio lose over 750 employees, effectively halving it in size.
We hope that Bungie can turn things around, because we were massive fans of Destiny 2 at its peak. Rumours are that Destiny 3 is now in the works, and will likely have an even greater priority placed on it going forward.
Source: PlayStation