Sony’s ‘Underperformance’ Is Bungie’s Miracle

While I was scanning video game news headlines over the weekend, as I am unfortunately required to do for this job, I saw one pop up from IGN that made me lean in a little closer. "Sony Reports $765 Million Impairment Loss Due to Underperformance of Marathon Developer Bungie", it said.

That's an odd way to frame everything that's happened with Sony, Bungie and online shooters in recent years, I thought, but maybe the intro to the story–reporting on some recent fiscal results–would be different. Nope.

Sony has reported a $765 million impairment loss due to underperformance of Marathon developer Bungie during its last financial year.

The PlayStation owner bought Bungie, the original creator of Halo, in early 2022 in a deal valued at $3.6 billion. However, the studio has struggled financially since then, with Destiny 2 failing to do the business and its new game, Marathon, having a hard time breaking out. As a result, Sony has admitted the acquisition has yet to pay off, resulting in these impairment charges.

What threw me about this story was the language used, and how each party is centred in the news. Bungie, a studio with a long and storied history of making very good video games, has made another very good video game, this time in a specific always-online genre they were likely forced to work in by a former PlayStation boss who is no longer at the company. That video game has not made as much money as Fortnite, and so Bungie has been painted as being under-performing, to the point where the story later says "Bungie has dragged down Sony's financial performance for the year".

I don't want to pick on this specific story here, or its writer. There's no malice or ill-intent in its tone or its composition; it only got to me because it's such a representative example of the way so many people (and so much of games media) still talk about the video game business online. When games media gets its news from fiscal reports, it can be hard to parse what's actually going on outside the numbers. If the report comes from Sony, and the report says Bungie under-performed, then that's what is reported.

What this kind of writing does, though, is help get Sony's side of the story out there as the official history, and play its part in distorting the lens through which we view the games we play and the people who make them. The framing supports a narrative that the people at Bungie have failed, that the game they have made is failing, when the reality is that executive decisions put them to work on a type of game that was destined to be a declining fad by the time the game actually came out, and that the only metrics for what constitutes a "successful" game are wildly optimistic ones based on delusional "line go up" sentiments at Sony and PlayStation.

And by couching the game--an entertainment product, a work of art, something that resonates with millions of fans around the world--as a purely financial entity, something where the fact loads of people enjoy playing it is overshadowed by the fact it's not making as much money as it could be, sucks. This isn't how the average person (and I'm going to suggest that the person getting their video games news from IGN is the very definition of this) needs to be learning about or engaging with this medium, or its industry!

To me, and I'm someone who doesn't even play Marathon, if you're going to talk about the game's performance in terms of money and playerbase, I think context is everything. If all video games that make it to release are a miracle, then AAA releases in 2026 in an over-saturated field that aren't actual, instant failures are even more miraculous. "Bungie Working Miracles Despite Having Hands Tied Behind Back" might have been a more accurate summary of events!