Join The Community
It appears Sony is still paying for the acquisition of Bungie a few years ago. According to the company's latest earnings report, it took "impairment losses" of around $765 million against the Destiny 2 maker's assets for the 2025 fiscal year, which ended in March 2026.
In a slide as part of a bullet-point rundown of Sony's performance over the previous financial year, it's stated the corporation lost 120.1 billion yen against Bungie's "intangible and other assets." This lands in the region of $765 million, when converted. Prior insights showed Bungie assets, including those "in connection with Destiny 2," costing Sony around $204 million in the second quarter, and things have continued to stack from there.
In March, we saw the launch of Marathon, a brand new extraction shooter from the original home of Halo. It's the first new FPS from the studio in almost a decade, and first non-Destiny release in 12 years. Despite that pedigree, there's an impairment loss tied to Bungie in the region of $565 million, or 88.6 billion yen, for the last quarter.
This only compounds previous beliefs that Marathon performed below expectations. After garnering some buzz through server slams, the sci-fi FPS shifted an estimated 1.2 million copies its first month, not quite managing to be the zeitgeist-dominating release I'm sure Bungie and Sony were hoping for given the $3.6 billion acquisition cost in 2022.
Though broadly similar to the current hotness Arc Raiders, Marathon is distinctly more punishing. The difficulty curve on PvE is higher, the UI is more obtuse, and the lore is more involved. Its first raid, the Cryo Archive, has been noted for being particularly challenging, to the point Bungie made it a little easier in an update.
These factors are likely among the contributors to the current state of affairs between Sony and Bungie. It's not all a downward spiral, mind. Sales in the games division were "essentially flat" across the board, the report adds, as software is balanced out by decreased hardware sales. Projections for the coming year are positive, too.
"The FY26 operating income forecast is essentially flat year-on-year, which is due to the incorporation of an increase in investments for the next-generation platform," Sony states. "Excluding these factors, profit generated by our current business is expected to grow steadily at a double-digit rate."
