Destiny 2/Marathon

Bungie

In the wake of the announcement that Sony has now racked up $765 million in impairment losses against Bungie, devaluing the asset it once purchased for $3.6 billion, significant questions have been raised about the future of the studio and its two games, Marathon and Destiny 2.

While Sony acknowledged the underperformance that led to these losses, it continues to back Marathon,, saying more content and ideas are on the way to retain hardcore players and attract new ones.

Destiny 2, Bungie’s flagship game, was not mentioned once in either Sony’s earnings presentation or call.

It is becoming increasingly clear that it is likely not possible to sustain both Destiny 2 and Marathon within a scaled-down Bungie, especially as more resources are pulled from Destiny and shoveled over to Marathon, which has more devs working on it. I fear this may be leading to one inescapable conclusion: One has to go. Or at least be frozen in cryo.

Lacking both the resources it once had when Marathon had a much smaller team, and before several rounds of layoffs at the studio, Bungie is having significant problems producing even a much lighter calendar of content for Destiny 2, currently in the midst of its longest content draught ever and as such, its lowest playercount.

Marathon, meanwhile, is a fresh new release that is producing at least the sort of content you would expect from a game like this, stuff at a much smaller scale like a new hero, a map variant and assuredly more gear in the upcoming season 2 in about a month. But to even make that, it requires more than half the studio.

Even with Sony publicly backing Marathon, the game continues to bleed players, directly contradicting Sony’s earnings statement that “retention that remains at a high level,” which does not reflect public data. On any given day, Destiny 2 will have more players on Steam during the day, while Marathon is edging above it at night. But only just. But the reality is that Destiny has more players overall, given that Marathon skews more significantly toward a PC playerbase. This, the Destiny series that is in year 11 of content and during its worst down period ever, and Marathon, which came out two months ago.

If you have to pick one, what do you pick?

Before we get into this, I can hear people already. Am I biased? Sure, I’m biased. I’ve said publicly that Marathon is not for me personally, and I have played Destiny for all of those 11 years. But I truly do think that objectively, Destiny makes the most sense to invest in over Marathon, in one form or another.

I believe more in the ability to revive Destiny than I do the ability to dramatically expand Marathon’s playerbase and make it more broadly appealing. Is everyone fed up with Destiny, and has it lost a lot of players? Yes. But there is also that decade-long relationship with the game and series that players have, something that isn’t true of Marathon, despite it having some initial diehards.

Say Destiny 2 is gone and all of Bungie moves to Marathon. What does that look like? What are you producing at that point per season to sell millions more copies (if you don’t go free-to-play), unless you’re doing something wacky like totally expanding the game into it also being a battle royale or arena shooter or PvE horde mode? Are you going to spend another $100 million making a single-player campaign? All of that seems either incredibly unlikely, a bad idea, or both.

Throwing resources into Destiny instead, it seems like there are more options there. You could do some sort of grand Destiny 2 3.0 rework and relaunch, committing to more content and overhauling the things in the new era that players hate (goodbye Portal). Or, you do the more logical thing, put D2 on pause and spend some amount of years making a Destiny 3. But if you did this, then you’re printing almost zero live service cash from Bungie for the indefinite future if both Marathon and Destiny 2 are in something resembling maintenance mode. That said, if Sony can give Naughty Dog 5-6 years to make a new single player game, I don’t see why they couldn’t get Bungie a few years to make a Destiny 3 that would revitalize a franchise and become a probably decent live service after that.

This call would indicate more backing for Marathon than Destiny 2, as if you had a plan to invest more and revitalize that game, this probably would have been the time to say it, considering that Bungie was the biggest black spot on the entire quarter. You’re simply not going to say anything about the main series, one of the most successful live services ever, and a big part of the reason you paid $3.6 billion for Bungie in the first place?

Of course, I do not trust Sony to make good decisions. It has shown repeatedly, from paying $3.6 billion in the first place for Bungie to truly believing Concord was a huge new future IP for them, and especially in this live service space, it is clearly lost at sea. But in the current state of Bungie and this pair of games, it does not seem like these two can coexist, and that will be doubly true if another round of layoffs are coming, which unfortunately seems inevitable given all this. We’ll know more within the month once Bungie finally talks about Destiny again.

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