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

During its recent earnings report, Sony revealed that its acquisition of Destiny 2 and Marathon developer Bungie has led to $560 million in impairment losses for the quarter and about $765 million for the fiscal year. Despite this and sales data described as being “essentially flat”, the company reported a 12 percent year-on-year increase in revenue by over ¥54 billion (roughly $344 million).

Interestingly, Sony’s forecasts for the following year include a 30 percent increase in revenue, which the company has noted will be helped by the “absence of impairment losses” in Bungie’s assets.

Bungie’s latest title, Marathon, has been the subject of quite a bit of analysis, especially when it comes to its sales performance for PlayStation. A report shortly after its release indicated that around 1.2 million of its copies had been sold, resulting in a gross revenue of $55 million. However, most of the players were believed to be on Steam, with an estimated 800,000 copies sold on PC. PS5 ranked in second place, with 217,000 copies sold.

“Marathon is technically a first-party Sony title, so seeing the home console struggle to break 20% of the volume is a notable data point for the ongoing platform-agnostic debate,” wrote head of market analysis at Alinea Analytics, Rhys Elliott. “PlayStation Studios online games will almost certainly continue being multiplatform (despite Sony reportedly pulling back on PC releases).”

More recently, Ampere has estimated that Marathon was played by around 2.2 million players in its launch month, with 1.1 million players being on PC, and 660,000 using PS5.

It is worth noting that, despite the massive fall off of its PC player base, down from an all-time peak of 88,337 concurrent players to a 24-hour peak of 15,178 (via SteamDB), the extraction shooter has continued to see positive reactions from its players. Its low estimated sales on PS5 could also be down to Sony’s lack of marketing.

Former Square Enix business director Jacob Navok believes that this lack of advertising effort on Sony’s part reveals the lack of faith that the company has in Bungie.

“Nearly 2k loss in peak in 24 hours,” he wrote. “Brutal. I had thought the floor was 15k, could be looking at a 10k floor.” He went on to point to the fact that Sony hasn’t been using its marketing capabilities with the PS5 dashboard to push Marathon. “Sony owns a ton of digital estate on the PlayStation dashboards to push Marathon,” he wrote. “Its lack of marketing push to support the numbers speaks to the lack of faith from the platform holder.”

Despite this, Bungie hasn’t given off any indications that it will be slowing development on Marathon down. Earlier this week, creative director Julia Nardin said that the team continues to have a long-term plan for the game, but it also wants to get players involved in these decisions, since it’s “part of the magic of playing a live service game.”

She also reiterated the fact that Marathon has been designed to be quite welcoming for players to jump in at any time, with the studio making sure that missions important to the story will continue to be available in the game, unlike Destiny 2‘s infamous content vaulting controversy.

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