Destiny 2

Bungie

Marathon continues to try to retain and attract players with Bungie launching the game a month ago, and Sony is eyeing it to see if it can break PlayStation’s recent live service curse. But Bungie’s primary live service, Destiny 2, is fading quickly with a lack of updates, and it may not surprise you that Destiny 2 is not, in fact, Bungie’s primary live service anymore. Or at least it’s close to a tie.

My sources at Bungie confirmed to me that while previously, Destiny had a fairly significant edge in devs working on the game, now, of the 800 or so remaining Bungie employees, it’s now more evenly split, with Marathon now edging out Destiny 2 by a bit. Though obviously, the two games share some amount of logistics support within Bungie.

Previous information on the original split was from a combination of comments from Joe Ziegler and reporting from Jason Schreier, who said that after layoffs and cancellations, about 300 of Bungie’s 850 employees were working on Marathon, with 550, the clear majority, still working on Destiny 2.

But at launch and now post-launch, those two sections of the company have drawn neck and neck and getting Marathon some momentum is obviously the larger priority for Bungie at the moment.

The issue that’s pretty clear to players looking at both games is that Marathon is a game with four maps and six classes currently, while Destiny 2 has been previously sustained by a constant stream of PvE content, and at least, formerly, PvP content, which fell by the wayside much before this, with much of that team heading to Marathon a long time ago. Development on Marathon, despite its size, may be much harder than it looks from the outside, but compared to the previous scale of Destiny 2, it wouldn’t have been close.

Destiny 2’s PvE content has dried up for months now, and there’s another month and a half before anything of significance is added to the game at all in its midseason update, but after that, there’s still at least three more months until one of Destiny 2’s smaller expansions. Well, at least we’re assuming such an expansion still exists, given the almost total lack of communication on the longer-term future of the game.

The news that more and more resources and personnel are switching to Marathon may not be the biggest shock, but this is the first time I can confirm such a change compared to the last we’d heard about this. The question now is if more will move over or once Marathon settles, it may swing back toward an attempt to revive D2. But the idea that around 400 people can sustain Destiny 2, a game that used to have almost the entirety of Bungie’s 1,000+ employees working on it in some capacity, feels like a reach. And it sure seems like we have even less than 40% of the content we used to get at Destiny’s peak.

The future of both games is not yet clear. Destiny 2 was supposed to press forward with this new, smaller expansion/midseason update model, but that is obviously running into significant issues even just in year one. Marathon will continue balance patching and working on future seasons with new maps, runners and all-important microtransactions, but with a rapid departure of players, it may need to make significant changes to draw less hardcore players in. All of this feels like it’s on a knife’s edge, and we’ll see what’s to come over the next few months.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.