Following massive layoffs at Destiny 2 developer Bungie on Thursday, the company announced it would be changing course. According to a new report, that includes moving away from annual Destiny 2 expansions.
Sources told Bloomberg that while Bungie will still update and support its flagship live-service title, it won’t continue to release paid expansions every year. This is related to declining sales year over year, and how The Final Shape, its latest release, underperformed.
Instead, Bungie will focus on free, smaller updates. Into the Light, a Destiny 2 update from April, is one such example. It filled the gap before The Final Shape launch and introduced a new PVE mode called Onslaught, a new social hub, improved character customization, and, of course, new gear such as weapons and armor.
A lot of the company’s efforts will be moving to Marathon, which is set for a 2025 launch. The PVP extraction shooter is a revival of Bungie’s Marathon series of games, which predated its success with Halo. This lines up with CEO Pete Parsons’ announcement that the studio would be canceling several incubation projects to focus on improving The Final Shape and shipping Marathon.
Other revelations from the article include that Bungie was working on a project called Payback that sources said was more of a spinoff from the Destiny universe rather than a proper sequel. It would have a third-person POV and more about exploration and puzzle-solving than Destiny 2. However, it was canceled a couple months ago.
Bungie laid off 220 workers, roughly 17% of its workforce, and integrated 155 others into Sony Interactive Entertainment. One incubation project is moving forward, and a small team has been formed inside PlayStation Studios to work on that.
The company rapidly expanded over the past few years before getting hit with “a broad economic slowdown,” Parsons says, spreading the team too thin as it worked on multiple projects. Bungie has been struggling for a while, laying off around 100 people in November 2023 due to declining sales.
After the previous round of layoffs, Bloomberg reported the company had to delay and overhaul The Final Shape for a new June release date. This came after its last expansion, Lightfall didn’t hit with critics or players.
Imagine tapping a Zelda icon on your iPhone and jumping straight into Hyrule. A new open-source project called nxnative makes that possible by repackaging Switch games you’ve bought into apps for iPhone, iPad, and Mac, with no emulator in the middle.
Why does this run so well on Apple devices?
The Call of Duty franchise has held a special place in my heart ever since I played my first Black Ops game back in 2010. That game's campaign was something else, with twists and turns that culminated in a mind-blowing finale. We can all admit that compared to those older campaigns, the recent CODs have been lackluster at best, and a complete and utter disappointment at worst. The reboot of Modern Warfare did give me some hope, as the first two installments were actually quite good, but the third game left such a bad taste in my mouth that I wasn’t exactly expecting much from Modern Warfare 4.
After recently finishing the campaign, I can say that this installment is nothing like the recent releases and instead feels closer to the franchise’s roots. For the first time in a long while, the campaign comes across as well-crafted rather than rushed to hit a release date. It arrives three years after MW3, and you can see exactly where all that time went. It seems the studio finally made listening to player feedback a priority.
Epic Games has just announced the 2026 Epic AI MegaJam, which is looking to see how much game development can be squeezed into a very short window. This is running from November 12 through November 15.
Participants can work alone or in teams of up to five people, build in Unreal Engine or Unreal Editor for Fortnite, and bring along “as many AI agents as you want.” Epic explicitly encourages coding agents, AI-generated assets, audio tools, writing tools, and other AI systems. The official event page literally says "Vibe your way to $50k.”