Sony Writes Off $800M on Bungie as Marathon Bleeds Players

Nearly $800 million. That's how much Sony wiped off the value of Bungie during fiscal year 2025, according to the company's full-year financial report published today. The write-down, split across two quarters (roughly $204 million in Q2 and $565 million in Q4), represents over 20% of the $3.6 billion Sony originally paid for the Destiny developer back in 2022. On top of the impairment itself, Sony booked an additional $121 million in expenses from correcting previously capitalised Bungie development costs. This is not a studio in a rough patch. This is a studio whose parent company is formally admitting it overpaid.

Sony's Game & Network Services segment actually had a strong year otherwise. It remains the company's largest division by sales at $31.1 billion, and operating income would have grown 45% year-over-year if not for the Bungie impairment dragging everything down. PlayStation 5 hardware shipped 15.9 million units for the year, beating Sony's own 15-million forecast, and monthly active users hit a Q4 record of 125 million in March. Network services, meaning PlayStation Plus and the PS Store, were the real growth drivers. The Bungie loss was explicitly called out as the single biggest negative factor on operating income. I've covered a lot of quarterly earnings in this job, and it's rare to see one acquisition dominate the negative column this completely.

Marathon's Quiet Collapse

Marathon launched on March 5, and two months later Sony still hasn't confirmed sales numbers or total player counts. That silence speaks volumes. The extraction shooter is currently hovering between 10,000 and 15,000 concurrent players on Steam, which is reportedly where the majority of its copies have been sold. It hasn't managed to stay in the top 10 most-played games on any platform, whether PS5, Xbox Series X/S, or PC. For a $40 game from a studio that cost $3.6 billion to acquire, those numbers are brutal.

I wrote about Marathon's security update patch earlier this week, and the game has a small, dedicated community that enjoys what Bungie built. But a small dedicated community doesn't justify the investment Sony made. Bungie has been flirting with more casual-friendly modes to lower the barrier to entry, and fans have repeatedly asked for a free trial weekend or a price cut. Neither has materialised. If Sony is serious about turning Marathon around, the $40 price tag needs to go. Every week they wait is a week the remaining playerbase shrinks further.

Destiny 2 isn't providing a safety net either. The game is sitting at its lowest concurrent player count ever on Steam. Bungie's flagship, the franchise that was supposed to anchor the entire acquisition, is in freefall. Multiple rounds of mass layoffs have already hit the studio since the Sony deal closed, and former CEO Pete Parsons was replaced. Fans on Reddit and social media are bracing for another round of cuts, and given the numbers in this report, I can't blame them for expecting the worst.

Sony's FY2026 forecast offers a sliver of context. The company expects operating income to jump 30% next year, partly because the Bungie impairment won't recur. But they also noted that G&NS operating income will be "essentially flat" year-over-year when you strip out one-time items, because Sony is now spending heavily on PS6 development. Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter called the Bungie deal an overpay back in 2022, and four years later the financial statements read like a slow-motion confirmation of that assessment.

Sony also acknowledged during its earnings call that PS6 launch timing remains undecided due to ongoing memory shortages, with executives expecting memory prices to stay elevated into next year. PS5 hardware shipments dropped sharply in Q4, from 2.8 million units in the same quarter last year to just 1.5 million this year, bringing lifetime shipments to 93.7 million. The next generation is coming, but Sony is clearly still figuring out when. In the meantime, Bungie's two live-service games are supposed to be generating recurring revenue to justify one of the biggest acquisitions in PlayStation history, and both are moving in the wrong direction.