Marathon Pre-Order Bug Forced Players To Automatically Install Destiny 2

A gremlin in Bungie’s backend was briefly trying to upsell Marathon players on copies of Destiny 2. Players who tried to pre-order the upcoming extraction shooter ended up with Destiny 2 sneaking onto their hard drives as well in what is one of the weirder digital installation bugs I’ve ever heard of.

We know this was happening because Bungie publicly addressed it on X. “We’ve resolved an issue where Destiny 2 would begin installing after pre-ordering Marathon on Steam,” the studio wrote. “We have also resolved an issue where Collector’s Edition owners would receive an error when attempting to activate their game code on Steam.”

We've resolved an issue where Destiny 2 would begin installing after pre-ordering Marathon on Steam. We have also resolved an issue where Collector's Edition owners would receive an error when attempting to activate their game code on Steam.

— Marathon Development Team (@MarathonDevTeam) January 20, 2026

But that hasn’t stopped players from having a field day with the mere idea that Bungie wanted so desperately to enroll new players in its sci-fi loot shooter that it was forcibly installing Destiny 2 on people’s computers like a cracked rom site virus. “Marathon used so many Destiny 2 assets that it automatically downloaded the game when people pre-ordered Marathon,” joked one person. “Marathon comes with malware,” joked another.

While Bungie didn’t explain why this happened, it probably has something to do with the pre-order bonuses. Buying Marathon ahead of its March 5 launch date gives players free cosmetics for Destiny 2. Maybe a bug in the files was making it so the loot shooter would auto-download in order to register those rewards. Whatever the reason, it’s fixed now. Destiny 2, on the other hand, still not great.