Destiny 2 Bungie Chaos: Layoffs, Cheese, Halo MMO Tease

Bungie is currently hemorrhaging veteran staff while Destiny 2 ironically enjoys its healthiest Steam player count in two years, which is the kind of irony only a live service studio could manufacture. In this Destiny 2 news roundup you get the leadership bloodbath, a mobile spin-off nobody wants to pay for, a Halo rumor that refuses to die, and a genuinely useful AFK boss farm. None of it is subtle, so neither is this guide.

Start with the obvious headline: Bungie layoffs hit roughly 300 employees last month, gutting close to 40 percent of the studio's estimated headcount, and the departures have not stopped since. Studio head Justin Truman is gone. Marathon general manager Scott Taylor is gone, replaced by Joshua Deane, who now also holds the title of Head of Product. Marathon game director Joe Ziegler walked out on July 17, making him the third person to hold and lose that job in two years, handing the reins to Del Chafe III and Julia Nardin. Longtime design lead Lars Bakken retired after nearly 21 years at the studio and 28 years in the industry, and reportedly listed his new profession on LinkedIn as dog walker, which is either admirable or a quiet joke at Bungie's expense.

The Bungie Exodus, Tabulated for Your Convenience

A quarter of a million people apparently want a fresh start, since the official Destiny 3 petition just crossed 400,000 verified signatures. Whether Bungie can act on that with a skeleton crew is a separate question, and a Destiny 3 built from scratch looks unlikely given the current headcount. A D1 remaster or some looser Destiny Infinity concept is the more realistic version of that wish, assuming Sony lets Bungie's remaining staff near it at all instead of chaining them permanently to Marathon.

Marathon is currently sitting below 1,000 concurrent Steam players on multiple days, a third director has just taken over mid-season, and Sony has publicly reaffirmed it "remains an important part" of the portfolio anyway, which is corporate for we already spent the money.

Meanwhile Monument of Triumph, billed as Destiny 2's final live-service update, dragged the game to a two-year high of roughly 167,000 concurrent Steam players on June 9, nearly double Marathon's own all-time peak of 88,337. Bungie ended active development immediately after shipping it, so this was a farewell party, not a comeback tour, and the Destiny 2 Steam player count spike reflects grief and nostalgia more than any long-term plan. Circana's tracker had the game jump from 32nd to 5th place among US Steam titles in a single month, which is a brutal number to read if you were the executive who decided to sunset it.

Destiny's mobile cousin is not sharing in the celebration. Destiny Rising revenue has collapsed from an $11 million September 2025 peak to somewhere around $300,000 a month since March, a decline north of 95 percent, and Destiny 2 players are simply not migrating over despite having nowhere else to go. Season 5 recycled old content instead of offering anything new, which is exactly the kind of decision that keeps revenue charts pointed at the floor.

• Destiny Rising peaked near 11 million dollars in September 2025 and now scrapes by on roughly 300,000 dollars monthly.
• Downloads fell from 1.81 million in that same September to under 100,000 a month by mid 2026.
• Players cite recycled Season 5 content and gacha monetization as the reasons they are not sticking around.
• Destiny 2 veterans overwhelmingly prefer the real game over what amounts to a diet version of it.

Over on the Xbox side of the universe, a Halo MMO rumor keeps gathering weight. Reddit leaker HTD_Blog first claimed Microsoft has been quietly noodling on a Destiny-style Halo MMO for a year or two, an idea reportedly pitched by Obsidian and greenlit by Phil Spencer, though a different unnamed team is said to be building it. Leaker Technical Halo backed this up, claiming a source has seen footage of a real MMOFPS prototype. Then Halo Studios head Pierre Hintze gave interview comments praising cooperative raid experiences over pure competitive PvP, comments fans immediately mined as confirmation. None of this is official, all of it is plausible, and Halo already has a built-in audience willing to defect from a franchise currently getting sunset out from under them.

Destiny 2 players have found a genuinely lazy way to melt a dungeon boss using Dawn Chorus build components: Dawn Chorus itself, Incinerator Snap, Ember of Char, Ember of Ashes, and Solarmination from the Hunter artifact tree. Landing Incinerator Snap on the leftmost lock set triggers a chain of scorch stacks and ignitions that hops between adjacent lock sets and loops back on itself, all without much further input. It joins a small but growing pile of similar AFK boss farm discoveries this month, including a solo Riven cheese that Warlocks have been abusing.

Whether this survives the next patch is anyone's guess, since Bungie has historically nerfed anything resembling free damage the moment a clip gets attention. For now it works, it is nearly hands-off, and it is one of the very few pieces of unambiguously good news in this entire report.

So that is the state of things: a studio shedding veterans while its dying game outperforms its supposed successor, a mobile spin-off nobody is funding, a Halo rumor doing the emotional labor Bungie apparently can't, and a boss fight that plays itself. Somewhere in Bellevue, someone is updating a LinkedIn profile.