Marathon’s Steam Reviews Are Taking a Hit — And It’s Really About the Death of Destiny 2
Destiny 2 is ending. Not with a bang, not with a triumphant final season that sends players off in style — but with a quiet announcement that active development will cease after one last update next month. And in true internet fashion, a portion of the Destiny fanbase has decided to process that grief by review bombing a completely different game: Bungie’s newly launched extraction shooter, Marathon.
It sounds almost absurd. But when you understand the full weight of what Destiny 2 meant to its community — and the precarious position Bungie now finds itself in — the reaction, however misdirected, starts to make a painful kind of sense.
The End of Destiny 2: What Bungie Actually Announced
For nearly nine years, Destiny 2 has been one of the most dedicated live-service games on the planet. It launched in 2017, evolved through multiple major expansions, reinvented itself after going free-to-play, and built one of gaming’s most fiercely loyal communities. That ride is now officially over.
Bungie confirmed that Destiny 2’s final live-service update will drop next month. After that, the game will remain playable but will receive no new content, no new expansions, and no ongoing development. It’s the difference between a game that’s alive and one that’s preserved — the lights stay on, but nobody’s home anymore.
Making matters worse, reports emerged around the same time indicating that Destiny 3 is not currently in active development, and that Bungie has no other projects that have received a greenlight. For fans who had hoped the franchise would simply evolve into a new chapter, that was a gut punch on top of an already-open wound.
Sony’s $765 Million Problem
To understand why this situation feels so catastrophic, you need to zoom out to the business level. Sony acquired Bungie in 2022 for approximately $3.6 billion — a massive bet on the studio’s live-service expertise and the Destiny franchise’s long-term earning potential.
That bet has not paid off as hoped. Sony recently reported impairment losses of around $765 million against Bungie’s assets in its last financial year. With Marathon’s performance since its March launch described as underwhelming rather than transformative, and layoffs reportedly planned once Destiny 2’s final update ships, the picture being painted is one of a studio in genuine crisis.
From what we’ve seen covering the live-service game space at Dr Gamez, this is one of the steepest falls from grace in recent memory for a studio of Bungie’s reputation and scale.
Why Marathon Is Getting Review Bombed
Here’s where things get messy — and genuinely interesting from a community behavior standpoint.
With nowhere else to direct their frustration, a wave of Destiny 2 players descended on Marathon’s Steam page and began leaving negative reviews. The catch? Most of these reviews have nothing to do with Marathon itself. They’re eulogies, protests, and pointed accusations dressed up as game reviews.
“Destiny Died For This”
The review content tells the story more vividly than any summary could. Players left remarks along the lines of Destiny dying for Marathon, and called the new game “Slopathon.” One reviewer who had spent less than twenty minutes in the game — and subsequently refunded it — wrote simply that Destiny 2 didn’t deserve to die for it. Others used their reviews as a platform to demand that Destiny 3 be made.
The emotional logic here is clear, even if the target is wrong. Marathon is Bungie’s new flagship. It’s the game that Sony and Bungie are counting on to replace the revenue and community engagement that Destiny 2 once generated. In the eyes of grieving Destiny fans, Marathon is the reason Destiny was abandoned — the shiny new toy that got the development resources their beloved game needed to survive.
That framing isn’t really accurate. Live-service games don’t last forever, and Destiny 2’s declining player numbers and the failure of recent expansions to reverse that trend were likely far bigger factors than Marathon’s existence. But grief doesn’t always follow a logical path.
The Community Pushback — And Why It Matters
Not everyone in the Destiny and Marathon communities has been content to let the review bomb spiral. Almost immediately, voices on the Marathon subreddit began pushing back, calling out the behavior as counterproductive and unfair to developers who had nothing to do with the Destiny 2 shutdown decision.
Some went further, actively encouraging players who genuinely enjoy Marathon to leave real reviews — positive or negative based on their actual experience — to counterbalance the wave of protest votes. The appeal was specifically for authentic engagement: not positivity for its own sake, but genuine feedback that separates a game’s actual quality from the corporate decisions surrounding it.
At the time of writing, that push appears to be working. While the day the Destiny 2 news broke saw Marathon’s highest volume of negative reviews in a month, positive reviews outnumbered them by a significant margin on the same day. Destiny 2’s own Steam page has seen a similar dynamic, with supportive reviews flooding in alongside the criticism.
The Review Bomb Problem in Gaming
This isn’t the first time a gaming community has weaponized Steam reviews in response to a business decision rather than the quality of a product. We’ve seen it happen with games like Cyberpunk 2077 following its disastrous launch, with No Man’s Sky after its feature-stripped release, and most famously with titles caught up in political or corporate controversies that have nothing to do with the games themselves.
In our experience covering these situations at Dr Gamez, review bombs rarely achieve what they set out to do. They muddy the signal that the review system is designed to provide, punish developers who were often not responsible for the decisions that sparked the outrage, and tend to fade without producing meaningful change. What they do accomplish is giving a grieving community a place to voice their frustration — which, even if it’s misdirected, speaks to how deeply some players connect with games and the worlds those games represent.
What This Means for Bungie Going Forward
The bigger picture here is sobering. Bungie is now in a position where its only active game is Marathon — a title that launched to mixed commercial reception and is now absorbing the emotional fallout of a separate franchise’s death. Reports of incoming layoffs after Destiny 2’s final update suggest the studio is being restructured significantly, and Sony’s financial losses on the acquisition put pressure on every move the studio makes next.
A former Destiny 2 writer has publicly stated that the franchise’s decline came down to leadership decisions at the top — placing responsibility for the game’s trajectory squarely with executive decisions rather than creative failures. Whether that narrative becomes the accepted history of Destiny 2’s end remains to be seen, but it adds another layer of bitterness to an already complicated situation.
The real tragedy isn’t just that Destiny 2 is ending — it’s that neither the community nor the developers are getting the graceful closure either side deserves.
For the players, nearly a decade of time investment is transitioning into maintenance mode without a clear successor. For the developers who poured years into the franchise, the headlines are dominated by financial losses, review bombs, and retrospective blame.
Conclusion: Grief, Games, and the Messy Reality of Live-Service Endings
The Marathon review bomb situation is ultimately a story about what happens when a deeply connected community loses something important, and the gaming industry hasn’t yet developed a good framework for those endings. Destiny 2’s shutdown joins a growing list of live-service games — from Anthem to Hyper Scape to Knockout City — that have navigated the complicated terrain of ending active development while keeping servers live.
Dr Gamez has covered the live-service game model for years, and the tension between these games’ promise of ongoing worlds and the inevitability of their business-driven conclusions is one of the defining tensions of modern gaming. Every player who builds a life around a live-service game is implicitly accepting the risk that one day the updates will stop — but knowing that intellectually doesn’t make it easier when it actually happens.
Marathon deserves to be evaluated on its own merits. Destiny 2 deserves a genuine farewell from the community that made it one of the most culturally significant shooters of its generation. And Bungie deserves space to figure out what comes next — if it gets that space.
So here’s the question we want to put to you, Dr Gamez readers: when a live-service game you love ends, is review bombing another game a valid form of protest — or does the community owe it to everyone, including themselves, to find a better way to grieve? Let us know in the comments.
