By Nelson Schneider - 05/10/26 at 02:55 PM CT
Ah, it seems like it was just yesterday when the stupid one-upmanship of the Console Wars saw Sony spending nearly $4 billion to secure Bungie as a first-party PlayStation studio after Microsoft spend $69 billion in order to feed Activision-Blizzard to the Xbox Division. Both platform-holders seem to be regretting their decisions, with Xbox teetering on the brink of destruction, and all its hopes pinned on a new, non-gaming executive at Xbox, while Sony is already adopting the same kinds of hubristic behavior it always adopts when it thinks it doesn’t have any competition.
But Sony really doesn’t have anything to crow about, considering that it assigned a $200 million “impairment loss” to Bungie in the face of falling “Destiny 2” player counts and recurring revenues. Recently, that loss was re-adjusted... by more than double its original assessment, bringing Bungie’s total impairment loss to $765 million. That’s over THREE-QUARTERS OF A BILLION DOLLARS!
Of course, anyone who was paying attention – like, say, ANYONE on the MeltedJoystick Crew – could have told Sony that Bungie was not a good investment at the time, and definitely not worth anywhere close to the $4 billion they paid for it. I mean, how could Sony NOT see that Live Service titles were on a downward track? How could they not see that Bungie was losing ‘Destiny’ players hand-over-fist through their various enshittification processes, such as the ill-advised Sunsetting debacle and the forcing of BattlEye kernel-level DRM (and the refusal to allow this DRM to even function in Linux/SteamOS)?
And then there’s the final nail in the coffin: Who at Sony thought it was a good idea to let Bungie reboot their ancient, dusty ‘Marathon’ FPS IP as a PvP Live Service e-sport instead of the single-player experience of its ancestors? Sony still seems to be optimistic about “Marathon,” even though player numbers have already plateaued, and have done so at less than “Destiny 2’s” current, waning player counts.
