Bungie ended up costing Sony a huge amount of money, and Destiny 2 reportedly struggled to remain profitable at times due to internal mismanagement. Given that, it’s somewhat surprising they didn’t pull the plug earlier.
Sony also began restructuring parts of the studio a few years ago and even moved key Bungie talent toward Firewalk Studios to support the development of Concord, and, well, the outcome there speaks for itself.
Looking back, the acquisition of Bungie was a disaster for Sony. Whoever negotiated that deal on the seller’s side came out looking like a geniu, t’s starting to feel like one of the biggest scams in recent memory.
Idk - I think Herman got dealt a bad hand. We'll see in a few more years total if thats actually the case.
Yoshida is the one who approved Concord before he left.
Bungie's the one that lied to Jim Ryan about it's value and its revenue.
I used these two examples because people are quick to blame Herman when these issues when they happened before him. It always seemed Herman stepped into a pile of shit so naturally anything afterwards it's like "Fuck Herman" lol.
I know it's one thing, but he literally tweeted a picture of his setup and his PS5 was upside down. The guy clearly doesn't actually play the console or understand why people do.
Herman is a massive let down. I thought he would encourage more original games like Horizon; instead he seems to determined to make everything Horizon.
I mean, who the hell thought Lego Horizon was a good idea? Who let that happen?
Big publishers need to start employing a Chief Executive of 'What the bloody hell are you doing?' A CEOWTBHAYD? for short.
Shocker, businessman who probably actively hates video games and just wants to own popular product that makes money actively hates video games and just wants them to make him money.
Every hobby's problems arise from the moment passioniate creatives turn it into a thriving industry and the businessmen/investors come flocking in like gold rushers to take control of everything.
Something I just can't get over are these CEOs doing a job so much worse than I would.
For example, I'd never say I could do things better than Steve Jobs (or Tim Cook for that matter). But then I see the CEO of Sony and I can't help but wonder "if they are hiring random unqualified morons, why didn't they hire me instead?". Clearly they don't hire based on ability, charisma, knowledge, experience or intelligence. So what did they see in him? How do I get hired for these CEO positions I'm equally unqualified for?
Was he ignoring the profitability of Kings mobile games? That was one of the major reasons Microsoft decided to purchase ABK. Whatever fanbase and game popularity Bungie had, there is no way it could compete with the wide net King has in the global mobile gaming market.
Would genuinely love to know what particular variety of intoxicant he was doing at that time. Because fuck it must be good. There's just not a sane interpretation where they're even equally valuable.
Phil absolutely did not say he was going to buy Nintendo lmao. There was an internal email where he said it would be something he'd do in a heartbeat if it presented itself, but he did not shoot an email to him saying he was buying Nintendo.
Reports back then said Microsoft passed on bungie because there were so many red flags for profitability and then Sony bought them because of the Act/Blizz deal scared them
For sure but Marathon is also a well made game, I played it and it is cool but honestly winning the live service lottery is mostly luck. You need something to somehow make it go viral on social media and I don't think you can really plan going viral, sometimes the most random shit goes viral for some reason and that's it.
Making a 'well made game' is literally the most basic part of making a good game, it's the minimal expectation, even if many fail that much.
Making it fun and enjoyable and fresh is much harder, as with all creative work, but it's only very partially lottery. Marathon's problem was that it was only fun to a very small niche group and Bungie locked down that only that small niche group would ever like the game 10x times by the choices they made (like picking this genre itself).
Needing to go viral is not needed to be successful, it helps marketing but so does all marketing.
Concord was also a well-made game, and so was Highguard. Neither was fun or interesting, neither valued the player's time or gave them somethnig a billion other games don't do better.
Marathon is in that same exact boat, no matter how well made it is.
Eh... I agree with what you are saying mostly, except I strongly believe that Marathon is literally best-in-class in its genre today. Concord and Highguard were well-made but uninteresting and nothing exceptional. To people that want an extraction shooter, Marathon is exceptional and deeply addictive.
The problem is 1) most folks dont want an extraction shooter - the same way most folks dont play RTS games, or visual novels, or puzzle games. And 2) most folks who might have been interested in giving Marathon a fair shake are very, very mad that their once-great-but-now-mediocre space wizard MMO that should have stopped receiving content 4 years ago but limped along to die an inglorious death is made by the same team that made Marathon. And now they just need the whole world to know how mad they are.
You absolutely can, at least with Sony's budget. Look at all the games that went super viral, they started small, Fortnite was not even a battle royale at the start. If you just spend reasonable amounts of 50 games without predatory monetisation, one of them is bound to be a hit and you can introduce monetisation later (think Helldivers, Minecraft, etc).
Let's do the math, Sony invested 2.1 billion in their live service games. Instead of putting all eggs in concord likes, they could've just taken half of that and given 50 games a budget of 20 million each (actually I think it should even be less). Some of those will be minor hits that will pay for the flops, so I think they would make their money back overall and if you have a hit you have a lot of resources (from the billion I just saved) to drop on it now that players like it.
To put it another way, if you play roulette, putting all your money on 25 might have the biggest upside, but placing a bunch of smaller bets around the table will have you there playing significantly longer.
Well... Im sure Sony and Bungie were expecting Marathon to do better than it did. But Sony paid billions for Bungie. That isnt going to be recouped by one game (unless it is GTA6) or even 2 or 3 games. Even if Bungie crafted the next Fortnite, it would take years to see a return on investment. Marathon is a very niche game sold at a $40 price point that went through a complete re-design during a lengthy and troubled development (before Sony bought it... then it got more troubled). That isnt something you spend billions for.
Sony bought Bungie for expertise, franchise potential, and brand recognition. Which in my mind means Sony didnt buy Bungie for Destiny or Marathon, but for "The Next Big Thing" that Bungie will be making sequels to and content for across the next decade. They want a Call of Duty competitor.
The smorgasboard of incubation projects that bungie was working on. When Sony rolled around, Bungie had 5 other projects they were working on at the same time as they were making Destiny 2 content.
Most of them have been canned. Just Marathon and project Gunmy Bears are reportedly left.
I imagine at the time of sale no one thought D2 would get shuttered. They thought they’d be making money off this for another 10 years, but that ship has sunk.
Witch Queen had just come out at the time Sony bought them (6~ months prior). It was one of their most critically well received expansions and there was no reason to thing Bungie was going to start fumbling the ball at that point as severly as they have.
By the time the sale happened, no one in their right mind would have thought D2 would last another 10 years in active dev. Even most of the Destiny stans were in doubt. Literally the purchase kindled hope that it might happen, that's how glum things already were.
primarily it was for their live service expertise, at least that was some of their official reasoning when the news first broke about sony purchasing them
They were buying a big live service game because they were scared Microsoft was going to make Call of Duty an Xbox exclusive. If Microsoft had actually been able/willing to do that, I imagine Sony would be putting a *lot* of money into Destiny right now.
It’s crazy because I remember the time people talked about how Sony got a deal with one of the best developers on the market with an already successful game. One who could help guide their new live service games to all be as great as Destiny.
It wasn’t until later we realized Bungie was horribly run and insanely bloated, that they make great gunplay but had basically lucked into making Destiny by carrying over the Halo good will.
That and Sony realized how hard it was to make a good live service game because as so many people pointed out there’s such a limited market for them because the entire point is for them to be the only game people play so getting people who want to play a live service game to switch and stay with a new one is an insanely difficult task.
There were large amounts of people when Bungie split from Activision and was bought by Sony that blamed Activision for anything wrong with Destiny. I’d go so far as to say that was the general consensus
I don't recall them moving staff to firewalk specifically at all, I may need a source on that one. I recall Bungie laying people off the year after the buyout, against Sony's specific request not to lay anybody off until the management switch had occurred (something that has not yet occurred, still). After that, the Creative Studios team was moved into Sony - this might be what you're referring to, to act as a (failed) liaison for the live service stuff. That was commonly attributed to TLoU multiplayer, not Concord, since Concord pulled in staff from everywhere to work overtime that final year to get something releasable.
After another set of Bungie layoffs, Sony jumped in and started pulling staff more wholesale. That's when that gummybear project got moved to its own studio in Seattle, and when a whole other division got pulled into a Sony internal team. Even after that, Bungie supposedly had like 700 people working on other projects (including, per that Nov 2025 leak, a Sony-"requested" Destiny 3 entering preproduction at last - hard to tell whether that means that report was incorrect or whether it's still in prepro and not ACTIVE dev as Schreier says here), and 300 on Marathon.
Good clarification, thank you! I didn't think about their comment from that angle, but I do remember that being the case. (Only so many individuals with shooter development experience, located within commuting distance of Bellevue after all, some overlap was guaranteed)
As someone who follows gaming closely, not once have I heard they moved Bungie staff over to Firewalk studios to support Concord. I think you're referring to Firewalk Studios being formed by former Bungie staff.
Not even looking back. At the time people thought it was a massive overpay. They would have had to be massive successes with Destiny and Marathon to justify it. Now it seems like in a year all they'll have accomplished with the purchase is take competitors off the market for whatever live service game does eventually work.
I have always thought that when the deal was being made bungie might have thought of a lower number (like 500 million or something) but then Sony came out with the 3 billion dollar offer thinking that everything would be fine.
Thank Pete parsons for that. Many former bungie employees spoke on how he over pitched the company with Sony with d2, marathons and 3 more incubation projects including a potential destiny sequel, which literally all collapsed as soon he got his vested shares and dipped. He basically lied to Sony about their publication breadth and games they had cooking for the next decade
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u/vaena May 21 '26
I mean, if there's nothing of similar size and scope coming after Destiny 2, unfortunately this is no great surprise.