Sony Reports $765 Million Impairment Losses From Bungie in Latest Earnings Report

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Sony announced in its latest financial report that its purchase of game developer Bungie, known for titles like Destiny 2 and Marathon, resulted in a $560 million loss for the last quarter and around $765 million for the entire year. Even with this loss and relatively unchanged game sales, Sony’s overall revenue increased by 12% compared to last year – an increase of over ¥54 billion (approximately $344 million).

Sony is predicting a 30% increase in revenue for the next year. They expect this growth, in part, because they won’t have to account for losses on their investment in Bungie.

As a big fan, I’ve been following the sales numbers for Bungie’s Marathon, and it’s really interesting to see how it’s doing on different platforms. Apparently, right after launch, around 1.2 million copies were sold, bringing in about $55 million in revenue. What’s surprising is that most players seem to be on Steam – they estimate around 800,000 copies were sold on PC! PlayStation 5 came in second place with about 217,000 copies sold.

According to Rhys Elliott, head of market analysis at Alinea Analytics, the relatively low sales numbers for the PlayStation-exclusive game Marathon – less than 20% of total volume – are significant. This suggests PlayStation Studios will likely continue releasing online games on multiple platforms, even though Sony has reportedly scaled back plans for PC releases.

Ampere recently reported that approximately 2.2 million people played Marathon when it first came out. Of those players, around 1.1 million were on PC, and about 660,000 were on PlayStation 5.

Even though the game’s PC player base has dropped significantly – from a high of 88,337 to a recent peak of 15,178 (according to SteamDB) – players generally seem to enjoy it. The game might not be selling well on PlayStation 5 because Sony hasn’t been actively promoting it.

Okay, so I’ve been reading up on this, and apparently Jacob Navok, who used to work at Square Enix, thinks Sony isn’t really pushing Bungie’s games with advertising because they’re not that confident in them. Basically, he’s saying the lack of hype is a sign Sony doesn’t have a ton of faith in what Bungie is doing right now.

He reported a significant loss of almost 2,000 players in the last 24 hours, calling it “brutal.” He had previously believed the game’s player base wouldn’t fall below 15,000, but now thinks it might be closer to 10,000. He also noted that Sony isn’t actively promoting Marathon on the PS5 dashboard, despite having ample opportunity to do so. He believes this lack of marketing suggests Sony doesn’t have much confidence in the game’s success.

Even so, Bungie hasn’t shown any signs of slowing down work on Marathon. This week, creative director Julia Nardin explained that the team has a long-term vision for the game, and they also want to include players in the development process, because that’s what makes live service games special.

She also emphasized that Marathon is designed to be accessible to new players at any point, with key story missions remaining available – a feature implemented to avoid the criticism Destiny 2 received for removing content over time.

Marathon is available on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S. For more details, take a look at our review.

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2026-05-08 14:41