74% of Fans Want Destiny 3. Bungie Isn't Building It

Seventy-four percent. That's how many respondents in a PC Gamer reader poll said they want Bungie's next move to be Destiny 3. A new IP came in at 14%, a Halo return scraped 6%, and on Marathon pulled just 4%. The audience has spoken clearly, and Bungie apparently can't answer.

According to Bloomberg's Jason Schreier, citing people familiar with the studio's plans, Destiny 3 is not in active production. Some staff are pitching and prototyping ideas, including games set in the Destiny universe, but nothing has been greenlit. The reason, per Schreier, is straightforward: the money it would cost. Bungie confirmed on its website that Destiny 2's final content update drops on June 9, and Bloomberg followed that announcement with the layoff reporting, claiming a "significant" round of cuts is planned now that the Destiny 2 team has no project to move onto.

I wrote earlier this week about the $560 million question hanging over Destiny 3's existence and Sony's $765 million impairment loss on Bungie assets. Those numbers tell you everything about why a sequel isn't happening right now. Sony bought Bungie for $3.6 billion in 2022 expecting a live-service engine that would print money across PlayStation. What they got instead was a studio bleeding players, shipping a disappointing expansion in Lightfall, and struggling to make Marathon stick. Greenlighting a project that could easily cost half a billion dollars in that climate would be corporate malpractice, no matter how loudly fans are asking for it.

But the poll result is still striking. Four percent for Marathon is brutal. Bungie's current flagship, the game Sony is banking on, the extraction shooter that launched on March 5 to positive reviews but thin player counts, and almost nobody in that poll wants more of it. Marathon's second season launches June 2 with casual-friendly options including a PvE-only mode, which feels like an acknowledgment that the game needs a wider net. I hope it works, because if Marathon can't grow its audience, Bungie's pitch for any future project gets exponentially harder.

Where That Leaves Bungie

The content creators who built careers around Destiny are already processing the grief publicly. Datto, who has 1.2 million YouTube subscribers, streamed his reaction and got emotional. "It's been my entire adult life," he said. Lore creator My Name is Byf was blunter about the business side, saying the industry "is so far from its best at current that it might as well be continents away" and that Bungie's leadership "might as well have been on Mars." These aren't fringe voices. They represent the core of a community that kept Destiny 2 alive through its worst periods, and they're watching the studio that built their world walk away from it without a successor.

What makes this painful is that Destiny 3 is the obvious play. Bungie essentially invented the looter-shooter genre. The Final Shape expansion in 2024 proved the studio could still deliver when it committed, even if the player numbers never fully recovered from Lightfall's damage. A clean-slate sequel, free from nine years of technical debt and content vault controversies, is exactly what this franchise needs. Everyone seems to know it except the people holding the chequebook.

The realistic timeline, if Destiny 3 ever does get approved, puts it somewhere in the 2030s. Contemporary triple-A development cycles mean that a game only in preproduction today wouldn't ship for four or five years at minimum. That's a long time to ask a community to wait, especially one that's already watching its favourite streamers pivot to other games. Bungie said in its farewell post that it's time for Destiny to "live beyond Destiny 2," but right now, there's no concrete plan for what that looks like. The franchise exists in a holding pattern where the demand is overwhelming and the supply is zero. Bungie's staff will pitch ideas. Some might involve Destiny. None are guaranteed to survive Sony's approval process, and the layoffs Bloomberg is reporting will shrink the pool of people available to build whatever comes next.