In his latest financial report, Sony noted that Bungie, a developer of the ” Lost Star Ship: Marathon ” , had performed poorly during the previous financial season, resulting in losses of $765 million.
In January 2022, Microsoft announced the acquisition of a visual storm, while Sony purchased Bungie’s studio for $3.6 billion during the same period in response to the lack of an online service game created by the possible departure of Mission Call from PlayStation. The then-Sone CEO Jim Lane made it clear that the deal was to gain Bungie’s world-class development and business experience in the area of online service games to complement the PlayStation transition. However, Bungie ‘ s financial performance has been poor since the takeover, Destiny 2 has performed poorly, and it has been difficult to obtain market recognition for the preparation of the lost ship: marathon, which has been under way for many years. Sony acknowledged that the acquisition had not yet yielded the expected gains, and thus the impairment was applied, which also led to severe budget cuts and restructuring pressures on the Bungie studio. During the fiscal year ending 31 March 2026, Sony Play and Network Services claimed an impairment loss of JPY 12.1 billion (approximately US$ 765 million) to Bungie. In the report for the second fiscal year, Sony had raised 31.5 billion yen (approximately $204.2 million) for impairment due to his poor performance in Destiny II, resulting in an additional 88.6 billion yen (approximately $565 million) for impairment losses in the fourth quarter of the fiscal year.
The hard-core “search-and-take-out” shooting game, Lost Starships: Marathon, was officially launched at the beginning of March this year, at a critical time in the previous fiscal year, and it was during that fiscal season that Sony lost an additional JPY 88.6 billion in impairment to Bungie. It is known that the marathon has a budget of more than $250 million, but the game performance has been rather struggling, and analysts believe that it has fallen short of expectations. When the marathon was first sold, players suffered from too hard a mechanism. Bungie has stated on several occasions that, although the marathon learning curve is steep, as the game deepens, it will become easier for the player to recover from frustration, and the feedback will become stronger. However, the “low-temperature archives” of the copy area have in the near future further reinforced its extreme hard core experience, requiring players to meet a number of conditions for access. The well-known anchor and former CS professional Shroud had spoken out on the air, and maps of the cold archives provided an amazing game experience, but it was too difficult for leisure players. “The cryogenic archives map is crazy. This is the best search and evacuation map I’ve ever seen, and Bungie does design a very special loop. The question is, is it too complicated, too hard, too big? Can nine-to-five workmen go on? I don’t know.”
Where does Bungie go next? It is clear that the marathon is far from a complete failure like the Starings, but Bungie needs to take some measures to boost performance. Reducing the difficulty of playing might not be enough and there was a risk of losing core players. The move to free games just after the sale will only provoke the full-priced players. Can the single battle or the PvE model inspire new interest? What about the traditional PvP model? During the investor question-and-answer session, the Sony Chief Financial Officer, Dooline, stated that the company would continue to operate the marathon with a view to expanding the player community. “In our flag studio, Bungie’s game portfolio did not yield as much as expected, so we revised the business plan downwards and reduced the impairment of Bungie’s all fixed assets except goodwill.” “Players resonate with the marathon, the game scored 82 points on Metacric, over 90 per cent positively on Steam, and key indicators such as player retention remain high. In the future, we will work to improve the overall performance of the game by updating more content, further optimizing the game experience and broadening the audience to retain core players.”
Although Bungie was stalling Sony’s financial performance this year, sales in the gaming and network services sector were “basically equal” over the same period, and business income increased by 12 per cent. Looking to the future, Sony expects that the current fiscal year’s revenue will remain at the same level as the previous year, due to “an increase in investment in the next generation of platforms”. Sounds like Sonny’s working on PlayStation 6. Sony stated: “We plan to determine the volume of PS5 sales in fiscal year 2026 on the basis of the amount of memory that can be purchased at reasonable prices, and we expect that the level of hardware will be essentially the same as in fiscal year 2025.” We will see whether the future of the marathon will be a life-saving straw to save Sony from the muddy of service games or whether it will be a new muddy that will get deeper and deeper.