I doubt very much this happens again, especially after it hurt Concord not then anything. 

But at the same time, I can see why Sony thought it might work: Concord was meant to have weekly (I think) story and cinematic additions to the game. So it was like a blend of Sony's narrative focus with a live service game. Clearly didn't work though. Wrong audience.

And have more layoffs yes?

Even if D3 is not in development, I can't help but feel that the opportunity to just spin off Bungie into coop FPS game could work, even if they're just remaking games.

Yeah they don’t have anything at the moment. Jason goes further to say that Bungie employees are currently just throwing ideas as to what make next, including in the Destiny franchise, but nothing has been decided.

And it’s not like they’re going to be moved to Marathon if they’re gonna be doing “significant” layoffs here soon. I guess a smaller project at best at this rate.

Imagine Jimbo spent that 3.6b to get Crystal dynamics with tomb raider IP/ Edios deus ex IP for as little as $300m like embracer paid for it or better yet get the whole of Square enix and all their IP exclusive to ps5 instead.

A lot of Square would've been gutted not going to lie.

FF and DQ teams would've been the only that survived. FF is not as big of a draw as it used to be. DQ is mostly a Nintendo based audience. 

Bungie was only part of a plan not the reason why the plan started so in a scenario where they didn't acquire Bungie, GT7 and Helldivers 2 would have been the service push first taste and they were very successful so there would have been even more services, more services = more chances for failed services = more layoffs specially from studios that aren't making big money so CD and SE would have been impacted by them.

Realistically the only big value in SE right now is FF14 that ironically happens to be a service, a successful service = more services ... and so the cycle starts once again lol. 

A smaller project maybe is for the best tho.

If it was on me I would use Destiny 2 assets to build stand alone single player games. I would also reuse Marathon assets to remake the original trilogy, it wouldn't only be "cheap" it would also be a marketing tool for Marathon the service. 

Obviously it's not why Sony acquired them for but with the upcoming services (starting with the reception to the re-reveal of fairgames) they will have to accept that the chase is over. 

For sure SE has a lot of business departments like SE collective for indie game publishing that Playstation don't need. But their creative studios and IPS is the meat and potatoes of the acquisition. FF and DQ would certainly help pump up their console sales in japan which they also need right now after they butchered it with price hikes. All the other IPS while small is still a nice bonus compared to the 3.6b they spent on bungie only to get Marathon in return. 

Honestly I think all huge teams (300+) people should have small projects green lit and in the works alongside their bigger ones. If the team is truly huge then it can high production value releases built of the back of older game assets ( similar but maybe lower ambition than Miles Morales/Uncharted lost Legacy) or all the way down to tiny experimental projects like Nintendo's Drag and Drive, or passion projects like Obsidians Petiment. But honestly I'm particularly interested in the latter.

This all or nothing approach in the industry is quiet exhausting, it's just crazy that you have teams many 100s large in size that can go half a decade without output, meanwhile 25 years ago you'd have stories like this lol

"The original Halo: Combat Evolved (2001) was built by a core team of roughly 40 developers at Bungie."

I think the thinking especially at sony is that indies fill this space so they shouldn't have to, but the truth is indies don't have the same experience, hardware specialisation etc. I think we could see some really special things from sonys internal studios.

Would've been kind of a tough sell at the time, given Crystal was still contractually tied down with co-developing Perfect Dark.  Given how this was before PD's sunsetting, they would've been looking at a timescale of 4-ish years to really get the ball rolling and finally have all of Crystal's resources under PlayStation's control.

My PS5 Pro box plates arrived. I know it’s personal preference but I guess I’ll always be a slave to them big, black and chonky 🥰