The phenomenon of Fortnite has blinded some studios into thinking that replicating what they achieved is easy, which is maintaining a continuously high number of players who will return day after day for years. Somewhere during the Covid era, others came up with the idea that they could do even better than Epic Games and started spending millions to quickly launch live service games. Many of them have met with great failure. What fate awaits Marathon? The new "hit" from Bungie, the famous studio behind the Halo and Destiny titles. Currently, its fate does not look promising as it has lost most of its players since its release, and Sony has now decided to lay off almost the entire team.
In an official email sent internally, Hermen Hulst, the CEO of Sony's gaming studios group, addressed:
We have made the decision to reduce the workforce at Bungie, which will affect a significant number of employees, including most of the Destiny team and some members of the Marathon team. Reductions are also being made in teams within SIE (Sony Interactive Entertainment) that support Bungie's operations. All those affected by these layoffs at Bungie and SIE will be notified during the day.
Bungie also reached out to fans, more or less confirming everything that Sony announced.
Earlier, we wrote about what players' wishes are, and now that major titles have plummeted, we may come to understand what players will actually play, while producers and studios realize that not everything can be a live service hit. On the other hand, there is the problem of unsustainability of games, developers' salaries are too high, and other costs are no better, leading to a large vicious circle explaining why the market is currently what it is.
