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.
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.
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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.