They never got caught stealing assets in Destiny and the assets in Marathon are decals that you need to pause a video and zoom in to see. Its way more believable that someone who was bad at their job stole assets for a decal sheet than the entire art team deciding to rip off an artist by putting tiny decals hidden into the game that are clearly just stolen assets that weren't even changed. That's like some kind of James bond villain scheme.

Your last paragragh couldn't be anymore on the money. They really missed a golden opportunity to snag disaffected Halo fans with a single player focused Marathon with multiplayers modes. They could have crafted an experience Halo fans would have loved without the weight of Halo's lore. 

That's the craziest part. The original Marathon games had some S Tier lore!!! I honestly think it was the first FPS game that prioritized the story. At least before Half-Life came along. Granted it was primarily through terminals, so there was a lot of reading, but if you read the lore that connected the story and the world setting of Marathon, and you start salivating at the thought of seeing this type of world brought to life in a modern way that goes along with the original games.

To me, rebooting Marathon the way that Bungie did was a MASSIVE missed opportunity regardless.

Compared to the amount of money that GTA online,Fortnite,Apex and Roblox make Single player focused games don't compare. Sony is better off trying and failing with GaaS, than just sticking with single player. What have they got to lose if they fail? If you throw enough poo at a wall, something will stick eventually and it will make more money than all their single player games combined. 

Bungie already had a successful GaaS though, Destiny...It is still one of the most played games on both Xbox and PlayStation, it was in the Top 12 of Gross Revenue on Steam for the whole of 2024...They did not need to greenlight all these different projects (and then cancel most of them). They could have just done a Destiny 3 and that would have been a huge hit, then Marathon wouldn't have the weight of the world on its shoulders to be the next super mega hit or Bungie is screwed.

Marathon could have just been akin to Halo, it would still be a big project but it wouldn't have insane expectations on it, it would have had both a singleplayer and multiplayer component like Halo. It could have been a big success relative to the investment while Destiny still brings in the big bucks, and Bungie can still release successful projects on the side.

But now we have Destiny 2 practically keeping the studio alive but all of Bungie's screw ups elsewhere are now hurting Destiny 2 because all these failures are distracting focus from Destiny, all these sunk costs, Destiny 2 is covering them all, and instead of reinvesting Destiny 2 back into Destiny 2, they're having to invest Destiny 2's success into covering their asses across the entire studio.

It's worth noting that we don't know how much of the Destiny 2 playerbase will remain with the new saga that Bungie is implementing. The Final Shape was literally the Avengers: Endgame for the Destiny franchise. It was 10 years of build up that led to it.

Now with smaller expansions being the main thing for the game going forward, we'll have to wait and see if the audience will stay. Pre-orders topped the charts initially, but those are always the diehard fans, such as myself, that would've pre-ordered immediately.

So not only is Bungie fighting an uphill battle with Marathon, they've also gotta hope that what they have in store for Destiny 2 is enough to keep at least the majority of players around.

I know half of my old clan has left the game because they don't feel like there's anywhere else to go now that they've completed the arc that started in 2014.

Well, Bungie probably wants to have two successful GaaS franchises instead of just one. You can't just rely on the Destiny name/Playerbase forever. Sony bought them because of their success in GaaS, not because of single player. if that's the entire reason Sony bought them, it's easy to assume that Sony wants Bungie to just stick with Gaas, even if they fail. They're a huge studio + they're owned by Sony, the biggest player in the gaming industry so they don't need to play it safe with solid single player games with multiplayer components. Is bungie's financial situation really that dire as people are making out? Or are they exaggerating? 

Bungie has lost 40% of its employees since being acquired by Sony specifically because they kept missing revenue targets. By a substantial margin. And that's just with Destiny 2. 

Sony's own Chairman publicly criticized Bungie and wanted them to take accountability. Bungie has cancelled 5 projects in 5 years, a couple of them being big bets that didn't pay off. Combo that with the Lightfall expansion for Destiny 2 being a complete letdown to the point that even the follow up expansion, The Final Shape, with rave reviews didn't quite bring in the money Bungie needed. So yeah, Bungie's financial situation is getting that dire. You can't even fault Sony. This is Bungie's own doing. They conned Sony into buying them.

If Marathon fails, who knows what will happen. Your $4 billion purchase should be raking in money.

Edited

I tried to look up the numbers on google. It's 1600 pre buyout. I got 1350 but that was before the 2024 layoffs. It's 850 today. You're right. Still, it's worth taking another risk on a big GaaS game than just playing it safe

Trying to maintain two huge GaaS franchises at the same time seems like a recipe for disaster to me, Lol. Think Sony acquired Bungie mostly because of Destiny IP being huge, of course Bungie also helped out with Sony's GaaS initiative but uh, it's pretty obvious they've not been much help at all there either, so I think we can write that off.

Of course you can't rely on it forever but Destiny IP is still strong and popular, to me I think Destiny 3 was a safer bet than greenlighting a bunch of projects and then cancelling almost all of them resulting in hundreds of layoffs. Heck, Destiny 2 was still going strong, they could have just taken things a bit smoother, but their approach seems to have been greenlight as much as possible, cancel almost all of it, now put massive pressure on Marathon to be their next huge hit which isn't looking likely at all at this stage.

And I don't think Marathon having a SP component takes away from it also having a multiplayer component, I mean, Call of Duty still has a SP component and that doesn't stop it being the biggest MP release every year, Halo's MP component also grew to be big and take over the SP component in popularity, having a SP component didn't stop them from being big successes.

It was reported that Bungie has missed financial targets, revenue for Destiny 2 is down quite a lot, I believe these are largely due to Destiny being neglected and the reason Destiny is being neglected is because they're scatter shotting projects everywhere and then cancelling them all which then distracts them from Destiny because they're putting out fires they're creating themselves.

I don't think Bungie will close if Marathon underperforms but I do think they'll go through some huge and ugly layoffs and ironically that would be the thing that causes the studio to focusing ONLY on Destiny moving forward. If Marathon underperforms we probably won't see them try anything new for a long time, they'll just be the Destiny studio for the next 10 years.