LOS ANGELES — Sony wanted the world watching Marvel’s Wolverine. What it got was a wall of text screaming for a game it hasn’t made.
For the full hour of PlayStation’s June 2 State of Play showcase, the official Twitch chat was barely legible beneath a torrent of Destiny 3 emotes and the hashtag #WeWantDestiny3. Moderators tried to suppress it. They couldn’t. The demonstration was not spontaneous venting — it was organized, sustained, and carried into the Summer Game Fest broadcasts that followed, turning Sony’s marquee gaming week into an unlikely referendum on a game the company has not greenlit and, according to Bloomberg, has no immediate plans to make.
The context matters. On May 21, Bungie confirmed that Monument of Triumph, arriving June 9, will be the final live-service update for Destiny 2. The announcement blindsided the vast majority of the studio’s own staff, according to a Forbes report by Paul Tassi, who wrote that some employees had “begged” leadership to inform workers sooner. Those developers had been building content until the public announcement was made. What they were not building, Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier reported the same week, was Destiny 3.
“Destiny 3 is neither in production nor greenlit,” Tassi wrote, citing sources close to Bungie’s planning. The reason, Schreier offered bluntly on Bluesky, comes down to money: “A lot of people have wondered why Bungie didn’t immediately start working on Destiny 3 after The Final Shape two years ago. The answer, as it usually is, is how much money it would take.” Industry timelines suggest a sequel built at the scale the community expects would cost upward of $500 million and would not reach players before 2030 at the earliest — a price tag Sony, which recorded a $765 million impairment loss on Bungie assets in its last financial year, is not prepared to sanction in a contracting games market.
The players who built nine years of engagement around Destiny 2 did not accept that math quietly. A Change.org petition asking Sony to greenlight a sequel crossed 300,000 signatures inside a week of the announcement, cleared 338,000 by the time the State of Play aired, and had climbed toward 350,000 by the following weekend. The petition began on May 22 — the day after Bungie’s announcement — and surged past 40,000 names in under 24 hours, then past 200,000 in three days. Nothing in the petition compels Bungie or Sony to act. What it represents is a community demonstrating that its grief is not passive.
The Twitch flood was the louder half of that demonstration. As early as three hours before the State of Play broadcast began, nearly 6,000 viewers had already gathered in the waiting room with “Save Destiny” and “We Want Destiny 3” appearing in rolling succession, as GameSpot reported. Once the show started, the chants intensified. A Destiny emote created by streamer Aztecross gave the protest a visual shorthand that the chat’s rapid scroll made impossible to ignore. PlayStation’s Twitch moderators flagged and deleted messages carrying the hashtag — to, as Kotaku reported, little avail.
Aztecross had made his position explicit the month before. “I don’t want to play Marathon,” he said in a video that circulated widely through the community. “I’ll play it maybe seasonally. But I want Destiny 3. I want this universe expanded. And Marathon, if I have to bury you myself to send that message, I shall.” The clip had become a rallying text. Bungie’s extraction shooter Marathon, now the studio’s only active title, carries the burden of justifying a $3.6 billion acquisition that has not yet produced the financial returns Sony expected when it purchased the studio in 2022.
The one break in the State of Play’s Destiny 3 chant came mid-show, when Sony spotlighted Marathon Season 2, which launched the same day. “Booooooo,” wrote one viewer. “I will never play Marathon,” wrote another. The backlash has hardened into a specific ask: not more Destiny 2, and not Marathon, but a commitment to building the sequel the franchise was moving toward before Sony and Bungie’s financial situation intervened.
That ask sits uneasily against Bungie’s internal reality. Destiny 2 staffers are reportedly being shifted in batches to Marathon. Those who are not are being asked to pitch new projects, some set within the Destiny universe, but none of those pitches have been approved. “The pipeline outside of Marathon is essentially empty,” as Bloomberg framed it. A separate wave of “significant” layoffs is planned — the exact headcount is unknown, but Bungie has already reduced its workforce multiple times since the Sony acquisition. The employees who built Destiny 2 into a nine-year live service face the prospect of departing a studio that cannot tell them what it is making next.
Some players have channeled the frustration into a final act of loyalty rather than protest. A contingent of the community is organizing a mass login to Destiny 2‘s servers on June 9 — the day Monument of Triumph goes live and active development ends for good — to fill the game one last time before it becomes, as one online discussion thread framed it, a digital museum. Bungie has confirmed the game will remain online and playable after June 9, its raids, Crucible modes, and old campaign content intact but frozen, a preserved monument to a franchise whose next chapter nobody can currently name.
The deeper unresolved question is whether the protest constitutes meaningful commercial pressure on Sony, or whether it is grief performing the shape of leverage. A petition with 350,000 signatures in a global gaming market of hundreds of millions of players is a committed minority — loud, organized, and entirely correct that Destiny‘s community once made Bungie one of PlayStation’s most valuable studios. Whether Sony reads that as an argument to greenlight a $500 million project in a down cycle, or as a reminder of the sunk cost it has already written off, is a decision that has not yet been made and may not be made publicly for months.
The State of Play ended. The chanting did not. Summer Game Fest 2026 produced major announcements across multiple franchises — none of them from Bungie. Sony’s FlexStrike Fight Stick launch the same week, covered as PlayStation expanded its hardware line, underscored how much of Sony’s gaming week unfolded against a backdrop its own fan base had turned into something else entirely. What Bungie’s players want from the company that owns their studio remains unanswered, as it was when the broadcast began and as it will be when the servers log their last Monument of Triumph completion on June 9.
