Bungie lost roughly 40% of its workforce in one day on July 31, 2024, with hundreds of employees either being let go or sent to work on other projects. As a result, Destiny spinoff Payback has been shelved, and Destiny 3 isn’t even being made according to reports.
Bungie had a massive series of layoffs in October 2023, with many Destiny 2 players being skeptical of how The Final Shape would turn out following staff reductions at the time.
However, the expansion was a critical and commercial success. It successfully revived Destiny 2. But, it also resulted in even more layoffs despite the team delivering an experience players loved.
There have even been calls for CEO Pete Parsons to step down as a result of these large-scale layoffs, and, according to reports, this could mark a massive downturn for the series.
Grubb initially covered it on his Game Mess Mornings podcast, claiming that these layoffs resulted in a Destiny spinoff codenamed ‘Payback’ being “shelved indefinitely” – one that wasn’t internally being considered Destiny 3.
Please listen to Game Mess Mornings today. It's the first segment, and it will have all of the details you need. But the short version is that Payload, which is the "next Destiny," is being shelved indefinitely. They do not internally consider it Destiny 3, fwiw. https://t.co/iLG30OmR1u
— Grubb (@JeffGrubb) August 1, 2024
Grubb also claimed on his podcast that Destiny 2 will continue to get new content, but that it’d be “lighter, smaller, and take less time than The Final Shape did.” Marathon is the studio’s primary focus, at the cost of both Destiny 3 and Payback.
He continued, “Expansions? They’re not even using that term internally anymore, they’re calling them content packs. That should put it in perspective what you should expect from Destiny 2 going forward. They want Destiny 2 to keep being a thing, but the investment level is going to pare back in a significant way.”
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According to him, these “content packs” are the only new Destiny content being worked on at Bungie.
“Payback is going on the shelf indefinitely according to the people I’ve talked to,” he explained. “Let’s be clear; a Destiny 3 or Next Destiny is not the thing [Bungie] is gonna come out of this looking toward, let alone working on in any real way.”
Bloomberg’s Jason Schrier followed up, as he clarified these layoffs weren’t what got Payback shelved. Rather, the project had been removed from active development a while back according to his sources.
Just to clear up some rumors floating around, Destiny 3 was not canceled because it was never in development, per people familiar. Bungie did some very early work on a spinoff project called Payback, but they canceled that a while ago. I'll have a story tomorrow with more info
— Jason Schreier (@jasonschreier) August 1, 2024
However, Schreier corroborated both the name of the spinoff and that Destiny 3 isn’t even being made. This doesn’t mean that Destiny 3 won’t ever come out, but that the game isn’t currently in development.
This, combined with Grubb’s claim that Destiny 2 is stepping away from large-scale expansions, means that Destiny fans will have to wait a while until anything big happens for the series.