Sony overpaid for Bungie, because they bought it to fuel their live service games dream, which nearly all flopped or weren't even released. Destiny was still reallt big back then but the majority of it was an investment to get knowhow about those kinds of games.

Under Sony Playstation studios you can expect massive layouts if a studio with 900 people is delivering a Marathon kind of return, they are twice as bigger than Naughty Dog or Santa Monica, and those are capable of bringing out games that sell 15M+ and push the Playstation branding to the sky.

Marathon would be lucky if it has sold 2M copies by now, there is no way Bungie is in anything but panic mode right now, either for the game existence and/or the likelyhood of their jobs being the ones about to be cut out when it move to PS Studios and gets its size halved.

I would say Bungie would actually end up being closed if they didn't invest so much on it, they will try to salvage it and very likely make it move to developing Destiny 3 asap, so if Marathon can't manage to bring enough money to pay back the people keeping it running and creating new content for it, it's likely to be shut down by the time Tokon is releasing (timeframe, nothing to do with Tokon itself). Their employees are likely very well paid as devs from big studios are, so it's really unlike this game will be kept updated for long if its bleeding money every month.

Marathon was only made by 300 people out of Bungie's entire staff at peak development. This was after Project Payback got cancelled in summer of 2024 and the team got moved onto Marathon. Before that it was unknown how many people were in development, but this was certainly not a big priority game. Maybe 150 out of Bungie's ~1200 staff.

The crazy expectations for this game come from a lot of misunderstanding and inflated development costs because people don't understand it was a side project for Bungie. The entire studio is no hinging on this game. Destiny 3 is still a guaranteed money maker one day. The IP rights alone are worth hundreds of millions.

People also overlook the fact that Destiny 2 was a platinum(top 12 based on revenue) game on steam ever year since Sony purchased them up to 2025(when it was silver). The floor for Platinum is almost certainly in excess of $100m+ a year. So the game was very likely make several hundred million a year for a good few years after the purchase.

Bungie overpromised on revenue targets and didn't deliver. They paid the price for that and might pay a further price, but that's not the same as the studio being on its last legs or something. Bungie will hav easily generated revenues in excess of half a billion since the purchase. Compare that to some single player studios that might go 5-6 years without a release and have almost no revenue for the last 2-3 years of that. Arrowhead didn't release a game for about 9 years and we're getting full funded by Sony. 

If Marathon is a side project where is the main game? Destiny made money but it has slowed to a crawl.

Do you honestly think Sony will be ok with waiting like 5 years for Destiny 3 to release while Destiny 2 is dead and Marathon is likely also dead? With 900 people working there that whole time no less.

Arrowhead has like 100 people working there and Sony did not pay 4B to get it. Expectations on Bungie delivering a consistent very high cash flow must be insane.

Well, bungie have 600 employees somewhere working on something. So, I guess we'll find out one day but I'd be shocked if it's not Destiny 3. That employee count also doesn't include Project Gummy Bears which got moved to in-house at Sony along with all employees. The fact Sony took full control on that one gives me the impression that was the one they had the highest hopes for out of it, Marathon and Payback. They took control at the same time that payback got cancelled and Marathon got stepped up in production. 

I think it's more likely Bungie was more confident in Marathon as it was heavily pushing it, and I can't remember the last time we heard about Gummy Bears, they likely choose to stick with Marathon so they could have the bigger chance of success and avoiding being fully taken control by Sony.

Marathon is now peaking even lower in USA and everyday reaching new all time lows in weak USA hours. Sadly it's looking really bad for it right now.

The user counts are similar to other premium live service games with moderate player counts. Similar to things like Sea of thieves(peak steam user count 66.9k, ~12m units sold on steam alone) or Ready or not(55k peak, ~10m sold on steam). These games sell a lot over time, by remaining around the top 100 or 200 constantly and peaking at content updates. Marathon will do the same thing and it might never hit 60k players again and can still sell 10m copies. It will be a very financially stable game, but obviously no one is retiring off its success or throwing parties. 

I wonder how can Marathon manage to sell over 10M when it's struggling to reach 2M on launch.

Sea of Thieves did get a second wind after a while if I recall it right, I don't think Marathon is a similar experience, it demands a lot of its players time for grinding apparently, but even so, games being saved by the community down the road are lucky cases, not expected outcomes.

That’s just how player counts work, and why concurrent numbers are problematic to read too much into. Read Dead Redemption 2 has a peak player count on Steam of 99,993 and its estimated to have sold over 20m+ copies on Steam. Games that sell a lot over time do not have big concurrent numbers.

If you sell something like 5k copies a day, then that’s almost 2m a year. Live service games remain in the public eye constantly and instead of falling 2000 in the sales charts they tend to remain around 100-200 and those sales add up over time. Sea of Thieves sold 1m in its first month available on Steam btw.