Bungie Says Marathon Missed Players and Must Evolve

Bungie said Marathon did not reach as many players as it had hoped, and that the extraction shooter needs to evolve. Studio head Poria Torkan and Marathon general manager Josh Deane put that line in a Sept. 21 video and studio post, the day before a Sept. 22 update the team had already pushed to December.

The same letter called Destiny foundational and promised to restore vaulted campaigns, destinations, and raids. Three months after Sony cut most of the Destiny team, the live game left standing is the one being rewritten.

Bungie Says Marathon Missed Its Audience

Torkan and Deane wrote as a new leadership pair trying to win back trust after years they described as a loss of focus. Bungie, they said, has been making games for over 30 years, then lost colleagues, lost trust, and lost sight of players. They did not ask anyone to believe a blog. They said trust would come from the games, the calls, and how often the studio shows up.

Marathon, in their telling, still shapes where the company goes next. They also drew a hard line around Destiny. The extraction shooter, they wrote, did not reach as many players as we had hoped, even though critics liked it and the people who stayed cared about what made it strange.

So, we’re going to anchor on what makes Marathon special but evolve it beyond the genre constraints we placed on it. We’re going to expand Marathon to a deeper survival experience, that gives players more ways to take on this dangerous alien world.

Poria Torkan and Josh Deane, The Next Chapter for Bungie

That rewrite keeps competitive PvP and the chaotic PvPvE loop. It also adds cooperative PvE, which is the mode the launch build treated as an experiment rather than the product. Through the rest of year one they want more agency in how you play, and better ways to hear from people who never got past the first hours.

77,358 Players on Steam, Then the Drop

Marathon launched March 5, 2026 on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and Steam, with cross play and cross save, at $39.99. Steam’s store page still sells it as a survival shooter on the lost colony of Tau Ceti IV. OpenCritic’s top critic average is 81, which matches the “strong critical reception” line in the studio post. The audience problem sits in the concurrent-player record, not in the review aggregate.

MARATHON ON STEAM CHARTS

Steam Charts, which tracks Steam’s public concurrent-player feed, lists an all-time peak of 77,358 players in March. The last 30 days peaked at 3,772, 95% below that launch high. June is the only month that rose, and it lines up with Bungie’s Open Play Week from June 2 to June 9. July’s 14,699 peak is the next-best mark, in the same month the studio ran Vault Breaker, a limited PvE test on Cryo Archive.

Those Steam numbers are PC only. They still explain why a studio that priced a new IP at $39.99 is now talking about genre constraints it placed on itself. Extraction shooters punish empty lobbies. A map built for third-party tension plays like a scavenger hunt when the other squads stop showing up.

The June Memo That Named Marathon

The player slide did not happen in a vacuum. Destiny 2’s last live content drop, Monuments of Triumph, closed the decade-long expansion cycle. On June 25, Hermen Hulst, CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment’s Studio Business Group, sent staff a note that Bungie would shrink, including most of the Destiny team and some Marathon people, plus Sony crews who supported the studio. A Washington WARN notice listed 292 jobs at Bungie’s Bellevue headquarters.

Hulst still pointed at the new shooter as the live product Sony would keep funding.

Marathon remains an important part of our portfolio, and we will continue to support the team as they build on the strong foundation established in Season 1 and 2, and as they work on incubation efforts for future projects.

Hermen Hulst, CEO, Studio Business Group, Sony Interactive Entertainment

That sentence is the bet. Sony bought Bungie in 2022 as a live-service studio with more than one world. Destiny’s live run ended; incubation projects were, in Hulst’s words, too early to discuss. Marathon remains an important part of our portfolio was the public case for a smaller Bungie. Twelve weeks later the people running that smaller studio said the kept game had missed its player goal.

HOW THE LIVE-GAME BET WAS SET

1. March 5, 2026: Marathon launches on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and Steam as Bungie’s new extraction shooter.
2. June 2, 2026: Open Play Week begins, and Steam’s June peak climbs to 40,370.
3. June 25, 2026: Hulst announces cuts that hit most of the Destiny team and some Marathon staff, and names Marathon as a portfolio priority.
4. July 21, 2026: Vault Breaker, a limited PvE mode, goes live as a test of play without rival squads.
5. September 14, 2026: Bungie delays the Sept. 22 season drop, kills the strict seasonal calendar, and points at December.
6. September 21, 2026: Torkan and Deane say the game needs to evolve, and that Destiny is foundational.

Read in order, the year is a handoff that did not hold. Destiny stopped getting live seasons. Marathon was asked to carry a studio that had just halved its old franchise team. The Sept. 21 letter is the first time Bungie said, in public, that the handoff had not found the audience it wanted.

What Bungie Means by Evolving Marathon

Deane’s version of evolve is specific. Anchor on what is already distinct (the gunfeel, the alien colony, the nasty third-party fights), then stop treating extraction as a fence. Players had been asking, since launch, for more depth, more variety, stronger progression, and better reasons to stay. The Sept. 14 development post said the studio agreed, and that fixing it meant changing both what it builds and how it ships.

The first concrete move was calendar, not combat. Major drops will no longer be tied to fixed seasonal deadlines. The team gets more time to test before a feature goes live. Season 3, as a named season, is gone. The work that was due Sept. 22 now sits inside a larger December package, with a small October reset in front of it so the live economy is not still broken when the new mode arrives.

That is not a shutdown notice. Torkan and Deane listed four things they want to be measured on: a stronger long-term future for Destiny while restoring its past; evolving Marathon so the community can grow; more transparency on what is being built; and clearer talk when plans change. They also said they have already simplified priorities, cut competing initiatives, and moved decisions closer to the people making the games. Those process notes do not put players in a lobby. The December mode has to do that.

Nightfall in October, Symbiosis in December

October 6 is a cleanup patch with a new name. Nightfall Refresh resets progression and the in-game economy, adds a new Rewards Pass, and ships quality-of-life and tuning work. Season 2’s Nightfall track, Bungie said, pushed some people into the endgame too fast and left others stuck, which made extraction harder to join. Vault Breaker returns for a limited window after that reset, so the studio can watch how PvE sits next to a fresh economy.

The larger swing is the Symbiosis update on December 8, which Bungie calls the first major step in Marathon’s next chapter and the start of a broader change through March and beyond.

WHAT SYMBIOSIS ADDS ON DECEMBER 8

• Permanent PvE: The first standing player-versus-environment mode, built so you can explore, progress, and stay in the world without a PvPvE extract.
• Refreshed Perimeter: A reworked version of the social/hub space that Season 3 was supposed to overhaul in September.
• Firing range: A social space with a range, a basic quality-of-life hole the launch game never filled.
• New Runner shell: Another playable body, held from the delayed September package.
• Team Deathmatch test: An experimental PvP mode that sits outside the extract loop.
• New-player path: The first of several onboarding fixes, aimed at people who bounce before they understand a run.

Game director Del previewed that October and December work the week before Torkan and Deane’s letter. The follow-up they promised, a clearer vision for a more alien survival game, was due later the same week as the Sept. 21 video. Until that post lands, Symbiosis is the whole public roadmap: keep the extract loop, add a PvE door, and stop shipping on a season clock that the population could not support.

Destiny Gets Vaulted Raids Back

The Marathon paragraph in the Sept. 21 post is short. The Destiny section is the one the studio wrote like a vow. “Destiny is foundational to Bungie’s future” is the sentence they put in bold. “We are not done with Destiny” is the next one. Torkan and Deane said player noise after Monuments of Triumph changed the room, and that the first repair is bringing back vaulted Destiny 2 campaigns, destinations, and raids for everyone who still has the game installed.

They warned it is not a file restore. Changes since Beyond Light mean lighting, encounters, combatants, and other systems have to be rebuilt so the old activities match Destiny 2 as it runs now. That work, they said, will take months, and it is only the first step toward new stories and new Destiny games. For a studio that had just told Sony it could not keep a full Destiny live team, this is a reversal of emphasis, if not yet of headcount.

The split in the letter is easy to miss if you only read the Marathon headlines. Destiny gets history restored and a promise of more worlds. Marathon gets a genre fence taken down and a December mode. One franchise is being treated as the company’s memory. The other is being treated as a live product that has to find more people or keep shrinking into a cult shooter with great guns.

The Studio Asked Players to Keep Score

Bungie posted the video and the letter together on Sept. 21. The clip is the leaders talking through the same points, then pointing people at the blog.

Today, we’re sharing more about the future of Bungie, including our plans for Destiny, Marathon, and how we’re changing the way we work.

Read more on https://t.co/ZkmLWmaQZr: https://t.co/QbDwADGinr pic.twitter.com/F5tcXF0TsN

— Bungie (@Bungie) September 21, 2026

The loudest reading of that post was not about extraction design. Destiny creators and clan accounts treated the unvaulting pledge as a fight they had won, and they said so in those words. Marathon’s missed player target, in that same thread, was background. People who still run Tau Ceti have been asking for a PvE door for months; people who left Destiny in June heard that their world was no longer a closed museum. Both can be true in one letter. Only one dominated the replies.

Torkan and Deane ended by asking to be held to the work, not the post. They said a single blog does not rebuild trust, and that listening without action means nothing. For Marathon, the action now has a date. Nightfall Refresh lands October 6. Symbiosis, with the first permanent PvE mode, lands December 8. The studio that kept this game after Destiny’s live run ended has to show that a deeper survival loop can hold the players the extract loop could not.