As with most things in life, it’s hard to pin down an exact singular reason for the downfall of Destiny 2, which had previously been one of the most enduring online first-person shooters in the genre, but Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney has seemingly floated what he thinks was a major issue: Bungie and Sony not embracing generative AI enough.
For a player and journalist’s perspective, I’ll defer to GamesRadar+’s Austin Wood, who cites “unpopular systemic changes, wobbling epilogue narratives, and a severe content drought” as some of Destiny 2’s biggest pain points in recent months, and of course Bungie seems to have put all of its eggs into one basket with Marathon, diverting resources that would’ve otherwise gone into making new Destiny 2 content. But behind closed doors there were other factors at play, according to an anonymous source familiar with the situation speaking to Forbes.
According to the insider, Destiny 2 failed simply because it was “only very rarely profitable during its entire lifespan” due to the “enormous scale of content that had to be produced nonstop, lest fans revolt against its scarcity,” and because “when Destiny was profitable, those extra funds were often immediately misused by leadership at the time, funneled into way too many simultaneous incubation projects or ideas like spending tens of millions on a new, unneeded 208,000 square foot headquarters.”
Reacting to this report, Sweeney seemingly suggests a solution postmortem to that first outlined problem. “If only some sort of newfangled technology could come along and make it possible to overcome bullet point #1 and enable games like Destiny to thrive!”
If only some sort of newfangled technology could come along and make it possible to overcome bullet point #1 and enable games like Destiny to thrive! pic.twitter.com/ct7cgj2P0qJune 29, 2026
The famously outspoken Sweeney has long been, if not a full-blown proponent of AI in games, someone urging developers and publishers to embrace the tech as an inevitability “in nearly all future production.” Sweeney has long criticized Valve’s policy of displaying AI disclosures for games as “really irresponsible of Valve,” arguing these disclosures make it “much, much, much harder for a game developer to have a chance of success.”
With regards to Destiny 2, however, I don’t want to infer too much from what is, after all, Just A Tweet, but Sweeney could be proposing generative AI as a means to accelerate game development, or, much more dubiously, as a tool to actually create content. That distinction is at the heart of the current debate around whether generative AI has any place in game development, and if so, what that role is.
