#376: The final shape

Well, there it is. Yesterday Bungie announced that it will deliver the last ever update to Destiny 2 next month. While the game, like its predecessor, will be kept online and will remain playable for as long as people still want to play it, the live-service aspect of one of our era’s defining live-service games will end on June 9. According to Bloomberg, a significant number of layoffs are set to follow as Bungie begins the process of incubating its next big thing — assuming, of course, that parent company Sony lets things go that far. This is not merely the end of Destiny 2; it feels, likely as not, as the end of Destiny as a whole. (I'd argue the two games are one and the same anyway — I have never met anyone, outside of Bungie anyway, who uses the 2 when talking about the sequel — but that's by the by.)

Those of us who have followed the game over the years knew this was coming. Ever since the 2024 release of the brilliant expansion The Final Shape — which brought to a close a storyline that had been running since the release of the first game a decade earlier, and in doing so gave even the most hardened Destiny veterans a natural off-ramp, the perfect excuse to go off and do something else with their evenings — there has been a prevailing sense of a game in managed decline. You could tell that, amid the layoffs and the increasing needs of the then in-development Marathon reboot, Destiny was less of a priority for Bungie. Ever-lengthening matchmaking times, ominous CCU-related news coverage, and a dwindling buzz around new #content updates showed it was less of a priority for players, too. For a live-service game, this sort of thing always feels like a doom spiral. So it has, sadly but inevitably, proved here.

Blame Sony, if you like, for spending $3.6bn on a company with one declining game so it could help the wider PlayStation business with a push into live-service gubbins that it abandoned at the first sign of trouble. Or you could blame Bungie’s leadership for getting too high on their own supply, fattening the company up unnecessarily — doubling headcount, moving to a bigger HQ, spinning up an incubator, workshopping moves into film and TV — to make it a more attractive, and more expensive, acquisition target. Blame them for never really understanding what the players wanted Destiny to be, and waiting until the game’s last-ever update to give the community the stuff it’s been asking for for years. If I have to pick a side for the record, this is on Pete Parsons and co, but really, it was always going to end like this, wasn’t it? History tells us that once a live-service game has peaked there is only ever one direction of travel. Part of me is surprised Destiny lasted as long as it did.

Grateful, too, because it came along at the perfect time in my life. At home, our firstborn was eight months old when it launched in 2014; I had no social life to speak of, and the game gave me one. I played with a regular group, guys who were also online just about every night of the week, and together we picked the game clean. At work, my ever-deepening understanding of the game and Edge’s good relationship with its then-publisher Activision led to some wonderful opportunities, and some work I’m really proud of. (The cover story for The Taken King, the first Destiny expansion, is still, I think, the best thing I ever wrote for the mag.)

Things changed with Destiny 2. Bungie badly mishandled the transition; the sequel just wasn’t as fun, at least at launch, and most of my old group floated away over the course of its first year. By the time the fixes started to arrive, they were busy doing other things and never came back. I still played it, but much less intensely, and almost entirely solo. While Destiny’s inner workings had always tended towards the arcane, as the years progressed things just got silly. Returning after a few months away from the game was baffling; for new players it was simply impenetrable. Changes to its structure, geared primarily at keeping already-engaged players coming back, made it a game you could only really understand, and keep up with, if you no-lifed it. That was only ever going to end one way: with a steady churn of players until, one day, the numbers no longer stacked up. And here we are.

In an odd sort of way, yesterday’s news has made me keener to play Destiny than I have been in ages. The thought of a static universe to pootle around in, basking in the best gunplay there’s ever been? Freed from the need to grind some seasonal activity before it disappears, from the anxiety that today’s loot drops will be rendered obsolete by tomorrow’s patch notes, or the next big expansion? Honestly that sounds like heaven. I’ll be there on June 9 for sure, giving one of the defining games of my life, and my career, the send-off it deserves. I hope to see some of you there.

MORE!

• Asha Sharma’s Xbox reshuffle continued this week with the appointment of Matthew Ball as chief strategy officer. You may know Ball, a VC and analyst, for his annual assessments of the state of the game industry, which for the last couple of years have taken the form of 200-slide presentations. (I covered last year’s, but the 2026 version made me so profoundly cross I just couldn’t bear writing about it.) I am not sure, personally, that Sharma should expect much from the man who wrote the book on the Metaverse, recently suggested gaming’s struggles were at least partly due to the rise of Polymarket and OnlyFans, and spends 200 slides every year displaying an excellent understanding of why everything is on fire before admitting he is as clueless as the rest of us about where we might find the controls for the sprinkler system. Still, best of luck.
• Fortnite is finally back on Apple’s App Store after a years-long legal battle that everyone, except Tim Sweeney and whoever sends the invoices for the lawyers involved, got bored of ages ago. It’s available worldwide apart from in Australia, where the legal nonsense somehow rumbles on.
• PlayStation boss-goon Hermen Hulst has reportedly told staff that the company will no longer port firstparty PS5 games to PC. Bet it’s been a good sales week for Ghost Of Yotei. This is fair enough, I think; some ports have sold well but others have been rather shaky performance-wise, and rumours of Microsoft letting Steam onto the next Xbox didn’t leave Sony with much choice.
• Valve has updated the tagging system on Steam and, in doing so, has effectively decreed that games in the style of Vampire Survivors must henceforth be described as ‘bullet heaven’. Better than Survivorslike I suppose, carry on. 
• GTAVI is definitely coming in November, intimidatingly hench Take-Two boss Strauss Zelnick has promised. The publisher has hiked its revenue forecasts by 20% to prove it, which if anything seems a bit conservative imo.
• PlayStation Plus is getting a price hike, predictably. Current subscribers are exempt from it, but only for the duration of their sub.
• Quantic Dream is doing some layoffs after the failure of live-service moonshot Spellcasters Chronicles. I vaguely remember this being announced but had no idea it had ever come out, which probably explains a lot.
• Ubisoft has promised better things to come after its latest round of financial misery, which saw annual revenue fall by 17% amid a loss of €1.3bn. The publisher says things will improve over the next two years, with new Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry and Ghost Recon games all in the pipe.
• Hasbro has cancelled a Dungeons & Dragons game that was in development at Giant Skull, a new studio led by God Of War and Respawn vet Stig Asmussen. Bah. Sounded good, that.
• I haven’t written about Mixtape for at least five minutes, so let’s put the DTs at bay with some news. Developer Beethoven & Dinosaur has refuted speculation that the game will one day be delisted from download stores, revealing that all the songs in the game’s stellar soundtrack have been licensed in perpetuity. Good! Why doesn’t every game do this! You cheap fucks!
• I am so, so sick of writing about Fucking Embracer Group, which has inevitably been At It Again this week. So, I’m not going to. I’ll just point you to Game Developer’s magnificently titled ‘Lars Wingefors is out of his mind’ and leave it there.

We’re done! Free readers: if you’ve enjoyed this, hit that subscribe button up there, would you? Hit Points exists only by the grace of its cabal of paying readers, and we’d love to have you on the other, better-smelling side of the paywall. You get extra stuff, too: this week paid subs have enjoyed a monster piece on Mixtape, for instance, and there’s more fun stuff coming next week.

Have a terrific weekend, won’t you. Summer has finally begun in the UK after a wet, miserable and frequently freezing spring; there is chat about a barbecue at Hit Points Towers to celebrate, so I suppose I’d better get out there and mow a lawn. Lovely stuff. See you next time!