So Bungie was actually cooking up a “Destiny Infinity” rebrand before they finally decided to pull the plug on Destiny 2. That detail alone should tell you everything about just how desperate and messy things got behind the scenes at Bungie over the last year or so. A new report from Forbes’ Paul Tassi — a longtime Destiny player himself — has dropped some pretty significant insider information, and honestly, reading through it feels like watching a slow-motion car crash in hindsight.
The short version: Bungie considered multiple paths to save Destiny 2 before landing on the nuclear option. None of the alternatives got greenlit. And now, on June 9, 2026, the game that defined a decade of live-service shooters gets its final update and enters permanent maintenance mode. Let’s break all of this down properly.
What Was Destiny Infinity?
According to Tassi’s sources inside Bungie, one of the ideas on the table was to effectively relaunch Destiny 2 under a completely new name — Destiny Infinity. The plan reportedly involved scrapping the two-expansion-per-year model that the game had been running since the Year of Prophecy, reverting back to a single large annual expansion, and using the name change as a marketing reset to draw in lapsed players and new ones.
The thinking was straightforward on paper: instead of committing the resources required to build a full Destiny 3 from scratch, Bungie could give the existing game a fresh coat of paint, a new identity, and a structural overhaul — essentially a soft relaunch without the eye-watering development costs of a sequel. Call it a Destiny 2.5 in everything but name.
It didn’t happen. And the reason, as with so many good ideas that die in boardrooms, was money. More on that in a moment.
The Timeline of How Destiny 2 Actually Fell Apart
If you’ve been following Destiny at all over the past year, you already know the rough shape of what went wrong. But Tassi’s report fills in some of the specific internal details that make it feel a lot more concrete. Here’s how the dominoes fell:
The Edge of Fate Was the First Alarm Bell
The Edge of Fate, Destiny 2’s ninth expansion, launched on July 15, 2025. This was supposed to be the exciting start of a new chapter after the conclusion of the Light and Darkness saga with The Final Shape. New saga. New direction. New energy. Instead, it peaked at just under 100,000 concurrent players on Steam — less than half of what previous expansions had pulled in. The Witch Queen back in 2022 hit over 290,000. Beyond Light managed 240,000. Edge of Fate barely scraped past 99,000.
It wasn’t just the numbers either. The expansion overhauled core progression systems with things like the Portal feature and Armor 3.0 — changes that split the community hard. Bungie themselves would later admit that the Portal system and the broader overhaul introduced in Edge of Fate didn’t work. Players left in droves. The alarm bells, according to Tassi’s sources, started ringing at that point.
Renegades Did Even Worse
If Edge of Fate was the alarm bell, Renegades was the fire. The Star Wars-inspired tenth expansion dropped on December 2, 2025, and despite having one of the most recognizable entertainment IPs on the planet loosely attached to it, it peaked at just 71,278 concurrent Steam players — a 26% drop from Edge of Fate, which had already been a historic low. Twitch viewership collapsed too, with Renegades pulling roughly half the concurrent viewers Edge of Fate managed at launch.
That’s when, according to Tassi, discussions about where to take Destiny 2 became much more serious. The Destiny Infinity concept came up. Destiny 3 came up. Both were discussed. Neither moved forward. And sometime in early 2026, the decision was made to end active development entirely.
Why Destiny 3 Isn’t Happening Either
This is the part that stings the hardest for long-time fans. Even as Destiny 2 was clearly in decline, the obvious next step — build Destiny 3, start fresh — was never seriously greenlit. Gaming insider and journalist Jason Schreier has publicly stated that building a Destiny 3 would cost around $500 million before marketing and post-launch support. Tassi, after speaking with multiple industry sources, says that estimate is probably in the right ballpark.
That’s a number that basically eliminates the conversation before it starts. Sony acquired Bungie for $3.6 billion back in 2022, and that acquisition has been a financial disaster in the rearview. Sony took an impairment loss of over $200 million against Bungie’s assets in 2025 alone, and more recent reports put Sony’s total hit from Bungie’s underperformance in the $765 million range. Asking that same parent company to then write a $500 million check for a sequel to the game that just underperformed its way into maintenance mode? That’s a very hard sell in any boardroom.
The result: Destiny 3 is not in active development. Tassi’s sources at Bungie have no belief it’s coming anytime soon. Destiny Infinity never got off the ground. And the franchise currently has no confirmed future beyond the game going into server-up-but-nobody’s-home mode after June 9.
What Actually Happens on June 9 — The Monument of Triumph
Let’s be clear about something, because there’s been a lot of confusion in the community: Destiny 2 is not shutting down on June 9. The servers aren’t going offline. You’ll still be able to log in, run raids, grind Crucible, play Gambit, and do basically everything the game currently offers. What’s ending is the live-service cycle — the regular expansions, seasonal updates, weekly content drops, and narrative roadmaps.
The final update, titled Monument of Triumph, is free for all players and drops June 9, 2026. Bungie has described it as a collection of community-requested content — a love letter to the playerbase rather than just a maintenance patch. It includes the return of the beloved Sparrow Racing League as a permanent feature, a refreshed Pantheon 2.0 as a permanent boss challenge, updated raid and dungeon loot with modern tier adjustments, new class Aspects for all three subclasses, Crucible additions, and a Portal overhaul.
There’s also Destiny 2: The Collection — a bundle that packages all content packs into a single purchase, making it easier for returning or new players to access the full game library going forward. Individual content packs are also getting permanent price reductions. After Monument of Triumph, the weekly content cycle slows to a near stop and seasonal events are being replaced by vendor engram rewards, but the game itself stays online indefinitely — similar to how the original Destiny functions now.
The Fan Petition and the “Server Slam” — Will Any of It Matter?
The community response to all of this has been genuinely moving, if you step back from the frustration for a second. The Destiny 3 fan petition on Change.org has surpassed 290,000 signatures at the time of writing — a number that, somewhat poetically, has already surpassed Marathon’s all-time peak player count. Several voice actors from the Destiny franchise have publicly backed it. The petition is aimed directly at Sony, pushing for Bungie to be greenlit for a proper sequel.
There’s also a coordinated community effort to flood the servers on June 9 during the Monument of Triumph launch — a “server slam” designed to visually demonstrate to Sony just how much demand still exists for this franchise. The idea is simple and kind of beautiful in its desperation: if hundreds of thousands of people log in simultaneously, maybe the numbers make a case that spreadsheets and quarterly reports can’t.
Here’s the brutal truth though, and Tassi says his sources inside Bungie are pretty direct about it: neither the petition nor the server slam is going to change anything right now. The decision has been made. The financial math doesn’t work. A display of player affection doesn’t solve the $500 million problem. It’s not that Bungie doesn’t care — by all accounts, the people still at the studio are gutted about this outcome too. It’s that caring and being able to act on it are two entirely different things when you’re a studio that’s been through rounds of layoffs and is now fully absorbed into Sony’s PlayStation structure.
What Went Wrong? The Real Answer Is Complicated
There’s a debate in the community about who’s to blame for Destiny 2 ending up here. Some fans point squarely at Bungie’s creative decisions — the FOMO-driven seasonal model, the removal and return of Verdansk-equivalent beloved content, the controversial structural changes in Edge of Fate. Others blame Marathon, arguing that resources were cannibalized from Destiny 2 to fund Bungie’s new extraction shooter IP, effectively accelerating the decline.
The reality is almost certainly messier than either clean narrative. Edge of Fate’s Portal system was a genuine miscalculation that drove players away. The transition away from the beloved seasonal episode model created friction. But internally, the years of layoffs — Bungie cut nearly 320 employees between late 2023 and mid-2024 — hollowed out institutional knowledge and development capacity at exactly the wrong moment. When you’re trying to rebuild player trust with reduced staff while simultaneously developing a brand new IP in Marathon, something has to give. Destiny 2 drew the short straw.
The situation also fits a broader pattern happening across the gaming industry right now. Live-service games that don’t maintain momentum face a brutal compounding problem — player counts drop, which reduces engagement metrics, which makes publishers less willing to invest, which means fewer resources to create the content that would bring players back. Once that spiral starts, it’s very hard to reverse. Destiny 2’s version of that spiral started after The Final Shape and accelerated through every subsequent quarter.
If you want a parallel look at how gaming platforms and companies are making increasingly drastic moves right now — some forward-looking, some just survival — check out what Sony has been quietly filing patents for on the PlayStation side, and how new studios are trying to fill the RPG gap that games like Destiny once occupied.
Is There Any Hope for the Destiny Franchise?
Tassi’s report does leave one small door open, and it’s the Marathon door. Bungie’s new extraction shooter is the studio’s current flagship, and if it manages to build and sustain a healthy player base, it theoretically gives Sony a reason to keep investing in Bungie as a studio. And a healthy Bungie, post-Marathon, is the only realistic scenario in which a Destiny 3 conversation could restart from a position of financial viability.
Marathon launched on March 5, 2026, had a rough early reception with its closed alpha, and has been patching steadily since. It’s not the guaranteed hit that would immediately change Bungie’s financial situation, but it’s not dead either. The fate of the Destiny franchise — if there’s a Destiny franchise to speak of in a few years — probably runs directly through Marathon’s performance over the next 12 to 18 months.
Nobody at Bungie is saying Destiny is permanently done. Tassi himself carefully stops short of that conclusion. But between the $500 million development cost estimate, Sony’s massive write-downs on the Bungie acquisition, and a studio that has been dramatically reduced in size, the runway for anything to happen soon is genuinely short. The most honest reading of everything available right now is: not now, and not soon, but maybe not never.
Final Thoughts — What Destiny 2 Deserved
Look, Destiny 2 was one of the best shooters ever made at its peak. The gunplay is still class-leading. The raids set a standard that most MMOs never reached. The Final Shape was, by most accounts, one of the best expansion finales in live-service gaming history — a genuinely emotional endpoint that the game earned after a decade. The fact that everything since then unraveled so quickly feels almost cruel by comparison.
The Destiny Infinity concept is fascinating precisely because it shows that people inside Bungie were still fighting for the game right up until the decision was made to end it. This wasn’t a studio that gave up early or stopped trying. The ideas were there. The passion was there. The money just wasn’t — and in this industry, that’s the only vote that counts.
If you’re a Guardian who hasn’t logged in for a while, June 9 is worth showing up for. Not because the server slam will change anything — it probably won’t. But because Monument of Triumph sounds like a genuinely good sendoff, the Sparrow Racing League is back, and ten years of this franchise probably deserves at least one more login before the live-service era officially closes. Log in. Run a raid. Remember what made this game special.
And in the meantime, if the void left by Destiny has you hunting for your next big game fix, there are some genuinely interesting things on the horizon — from major franchise shifts happening in the shooter space to wild stories from the wider gaming world reminding you that this hobby never runs out of things to talk about.
