On June 9th, Destiny 2 will receive its last live service update. It’s the end of an era, and while a game lasting for a decade is simply a miracle, looking back on the legacy of Destiny is a little bittersweet.
In a blog post on the Bungie website Thursday, the developers wrote that “As our focus turns towards a new beginning for Bungie, we will begin work incubating our next games. To that end, on June 9, 2026, we will release the final live-service content update for Destiny 2 to begin that new journey as a studio.” Bungie outlined what it means to end support for Destiny 2, which has been receiving regular story and gameplay updates since its launch in 2017.
“Though active development may be concluding, we will ensure that Destiny 2 remains playable, just as the original Destiny is today,” they wrote. “Many changes in this final update will aim to ensure that Destiny 2 is a welcoming place for players to return to.”
The game’s final update, called Monument of Triumph, will be pretty massive, and will include changes that players have been requesting for some time, like a return of the Director and the permanent addition of the Sparrow Racing League. While I’m eager to see these changes, they come with the knowledge that this means that Destiny 2 has reached its final shape, if you’ll pardon the joke. A world that was once living and changing will become static. There won’t be any new lore, or loot, or secrets. This is the end.
The first Destiny was released in 2014, and even though the sequel came out in 2017, narratively, the game offered a contiguous story and gameplay experience for over a decade. That story was a sort-of-MMO first person shooter with a notoriously confusing plot, with the games putting players in the role of a Guardian, a superpowered individual equipped with abilities from a force called “Light.” Guardians were granted their powers by the Traveler, a giant floating orb that uplifted humanity into a golden age, but also trailed enemies called The Darkness.
All of this sounds—and often is—quite silly, but as a game I’ve never played anything quite like it. Its gunplay is among the best in all video games, and it singlehandedly made me a fan of first person shooters, but beyond that, the community it created has buoyed me through some dark times in my life. It’s because of Destiny 2 that I started playing video games on Discord with my friends every week, and through those relationships I’ve grown as a person. Destiny 2 has been woven into the fabric of my life, and I can’t untangle that thread. I got enough raid clears to earn a Raid Ring, which used to be a reward you could buy from the Bungie store after clearing the Raids that they ended up removing from the game in 2020. I was too broke to buy it, but I’ve also never done that level of end game content for a social game ever in my life. Only Destiny 2 could inspire that level of commitment in me.
It has not always been an easy road for this game. In 2020, Bungie removed the base game story and the first four expansions from the game, and I am still unable to play many of my favorite missions. Unlike the original Destiny, it’s now impossible to play the entire story from beginning to end. While Bungie promises that this game will exist in a playable state, it will also be eternally unfinished.
Some of this has been influenced by the rocky business history of Bungie in the past ten years. In 2000, Bungie was acquired by Microsoft, where they would develop the Halo franchise. In 2007, Bungie left Microsoft and signed a ten year publishing deal with Activision, leading to the development of Destiny and Destiny 2. In 2019, that partnership ended, and Bungie went solo once again. Destiny 2 went free-to-play in 2020. Two years later, in 2022, Bungie was acquired again, this time by Sony, and during this tenure there have been significant layoffs: In 2023, Bungie cut 8% of its workforce, with executives saying that Bungie was 45% below projections for that year. In 2024, Bungie laid off 17% of its staff. In a blog post, then-CEO Pete Parsons cited a difficult economy and an industry-wide overinvestment into video games as part of what led to these drastic cuts.
“In 2023, our rapid expansion ran headlong into a broad economic slowdown, a sharp downturn in the games industry, our quality miss with Destiny 2: Lightfall, and the need to give both The Final Shape and Marathon the time needed to ensure both projects deliver at the quality our players expect and deserve,” Parsons wrote. “We were overly ambitious, our financial safety margins were subsequently exceeded, and we began running in the red.”
This is all to say that at basically no part of Destiny’s tenure has the future of the game been guaranteed. In fact, the fandom has been extraordinarily pessimistic since the 2023 and 2024 layoffs, with many players unsure of the future of the studio as a whole. After the layoffs in 2023, players requested refunds for their pre-orders for the expansion The Final Shape. After the expansion was delayed, Microsoft and Playstation automatically canceled and refunded pre-orders for the expansion. According to a report from IGN, in 2024 the mood at the studio was rancid, with some fearing that Sony would soon take it over.
"I’m angry. I’m upset. This isn’t what I came here to do,” one source told IGN. “It feels like many higher ups aren’t listening to the data and are like, ‘We just need to win our fans back, they still like us.’ No. They don’t...We got rid of some of our most knowledgeable beloved folks who have been here for 20+ years. Everyday I walk in afraid that I or my friends are next. No one is safe."
Parsons stepped down as CEO of Bungie in 2025.
While Marathon also has gained a loyal fanbase and Bungie has said they are “in it for the long haul,” it, too, had a troubled development. After a mixed initial reception and the discovery that some of the art assets used in the game had been stolen from their creator, Bungie announced in June 2025 that they would be delaying the game, which had been slated to release in September. Still, the live service extraction shooter will start its second season of content on June 2nd, and Bungie says they will test out new modes of gameplay, like PVE and PVP-lite modes.
So far, Bungie has not announced a Destiny 3, and Destiny 2 still has some narrative loose ends from what Bungie has called the Light and Darkness Saga that started in the original game 12 years ago. There’s always a chance that there will be another Destiny, but as a player, this feels like a real ending. Endings are always painful—when I saw that blog post, I had to hold back tears—but they are also natural. Nothing lasts forever.
Despite my sadness, part of me also sees this ending as a kind of victory, however small a victory it may be. The video game industry has been having a hard few years, especially in the world of live service shooters. There have been quite a few high profile games whose developers ended support for them before they even truly got started, like Concord or Highguard or Last Flag. From that perspective, ten years of support for a game like Destiny 2 feels like a miracle. That Bungie gets to wind down support for this game instead of having it abruptly pulled feels like a blessing to me, as a player. Truth be told, after the expansion The Final Shape in June 2024, which finally had Guardians defeat the forces of Darkness, the writing has been on the wall. I’m glad that Bungie got to complete that story and that the game isn’t going to leave it on a cliffhanger.
Still, I am in mourning for this fandom and community. Literally last night I noticed that a statue of the character The Crow, an angst-ridden dweeb whom I’m quite fond of, was on sale for 20 bucks on Amazon, and I snatched it up. I ended up going on a trip through memory lane, watching YouTuber My Name Is Byf’’s videos about the game’s lore. I fell asleep browsing the website The Ishtar Collective, a fanmade repository of all the series' lore, revisiting the stories of The Hive and Savathun the Witch Queen. This is a story that has given me comfort for the past six years, and I return to the contours of its narrative now when I want to be comforted again. The story of the Light and Darkness saga is just that—a story about the victory of light over dark. Being a Guardian meant being someone who never gave up hope, even when darkness surrounds you. It’s audacious to believe in righteousness in such an uncomplicated way. But I’ve needed that, and I’ll always be glad that Destiny 2 was there for me.
