Oh, what could've been. It's been a rough year for Bungie, what with updates stopping on Destiny 2. the muted response to Marathon, and now the whole outfit essentially reduced to a skeleton crew. Turns out, we could've been seeing a lot more of the developer, since the teams therein had around a half-dozen games in the works before, during, and after the Sony acquisition, according to a new report.
No, really - that many releases were purportedly in various stages on the slate for the original home of Halo prior to Sony buying the outfit for $3.6 billion. This comes from Jason Schreier of Bloomberg, who spoke about the studio in a new YouTube video.
"As part of that acquisition, Bungie also had a whole bunch of other live service games in the works that Sony wanted to see come out in the subsequent years in addition to, of course, Destiny 2, which is Bungie’s big ongoing project," he says. There were "five or six" in total, and this portfolio was integral to Sony's interest in the company.
But "for a variety of reasons," he explains, "most of those projects fell apart." He doesn't provide any further clues on what these games were, but we can piece together the likely candidates.
There's the aforementioned Marathon, for a start, then the mobile game Destiny: Rising, that came out in 2025. Another game, known as Project Gummy Bears, was taken in-house at Sony and is still in development, though to what degree is unknown.
From there, we know of Project Sunspot, another Destiny spin-off, that was canceled in 2023, and Project Payback, a game inspired by Warframe, which was shuttered in 2024. We could speculate all day on the circumstances behind these decisions - Sony paid a lot of money for Bungie and clearly wanted a return on investment.
Whatever state these games were in, they probably just didn't seem promising enough to do that kind of business. But if at least one was moved to another team, the potential must be there to some degree.
It's all a pity, because now Bungie's a shell of what it once was. Whatever the future holds, we can only imagine how these games would've looked had they come out.
