It does feel like they conned Sony, it always seemed like an overpriced acquisition, then there's the huge bonuses the execs are entitled too and Sony paying extra to keep them around, paying to keep around the same people destroying the company, Lol. Shit I wouldn't even blame Sony if they took legal action against Bungie's leadership, though I'm not sure what that would be, Lmao. Oh and the "help" for Sony's GaaS initiative has seemingly been nothing worthwhile, they've had one success, Helldivers, hard to say how much input Bungie had in that.

But I do feel like...C'mon...Sony has to be able to do something...I know they have this special "independent" arrangement but for the love of God there must be some clause, agreement, some legal method, some shady business move, to remove these executives, Lol. Sony owns the damn studio and they're just watching these executives destroy their $4bn purchase and doing nothing about it. I don't believe Sony are totally powerless to do anything about Bungie's management otherwise they really did get massively conned by them, Lol.

Either way it feels like Bungie's rank and file leadership are screwed though =/

Edit - Microsoft also passed on acquiring Bungie because they identified a high burn rate.

I would argue that destiny 2 isn't huge anymore, which G2thaunit is also saying. So, don't think managing the two projects would be that difficult. The thing is, when you have GaaS, you can't have a single player game with multiplayer as an option because the game is fundamentally built around the multiplayer live service model. Standard COD has singleplayer with multiplayer but COD warzone only has multiplayer. Same with GTA 5 online. They have to be separate it's just how they work 

What i hate, is people jumping on the bandwagon of hate. Like on youtube, famous youtubers will put up a video on it, but in a way to kind of derail it or knock it off as being sub par. People join in, it becomes a mockery, and that spreads.

I get it, they did some dumb shit like copying art, but i want the game to succeed , if it is indeed good, instead of being dead on arrival because the youtube community deemed it a failure or uncool , before release.

Absolutely. If this does happen, let's hope it backfires and just acts as a load of free advertising for Marathon. They say that there's no such thing as bad publicity, but after Dragon Age Veilguard and Concord, I'm not sure about that anymore. It's almost as if people had the ability to influence those games into complete failure  

Some of you are completely missing the point. The game just doesn't look good. The stolen art issue isn't even the biggest problem, which is saying something.

"People just want to see Bungie fail" is a dumb statement. As a long time Bungie and Halo fan, I want nothing more than to see Bungie successed, but that doesn't mean I'm going to cheer for them even when their product looks mid. This goes for many of us who are not excited about Marathon.
Hardstuck said he would rather Bungie throw gaas shit at a wall instead of trying to make a quality single player game. In case you missed it, They worked on this incredible franchise called Halo which had both quality single player and multiplayer. Anyone who is truly a fan of the studio or gaming in general wouldn't say such nonsense.

Whilst I agree Marathon doesn't look amazing yet, I did not say that I would personally prefer GaaS. Show me where I said that? Literally quote my exact post and highlight in bold those words that I said it would be something I prefer.

I said it makes more business sense to just keep going with GaaS. No point making single player games when Destiny made them so much more money than Halo ever did. Single player is not where the money is, and for these publishers money is all that matters. Just the way it is. 

No amount of hate on Youtube will make a game fail. Again I point towards Hogwarts Legacy that became a great seller with a big campaign against it. So if you want to suceed it, you just need to buy it together with enough other people. We are interested enough to be on online forums like this, but the majority of gaming customers is not, they don't know about any controversy. For success all that is needed that the game appeals to them.

Not true. Concord actually nobody cared... until numbers already indicated a flop. Only then it became an online debate. The reason it failed wasn't hate (which came after it already failed), but desinterest.

And for Veilguard - it didn't even do very bad. It didn't do great either. But it underperformed regarding the expectations. A pattern seen often that managers have inflated expectations of success. But EA didn't even care that much about that underperformance, the big news in their quarterlies was the much more hurtful underperformance of FC 25. So no, online discourse didn't cripple these games.

I don't think Bungie has been particularly fine for quite some time now

Having this take after they lost hundreds of millions of dollars on Concord is wild. GaaS initiatives are extremely risky. Single player games aren't as high reward as a hit GaaS title but they are also far less risky. GaaS titles require are large development commitment in both manpower and dollars post launch. Plus due to the sunk cost fallacy, a GaaS title could be superior to an existing title in every way and still bomb because of players reluctancy to ditch the GaaS game they are currently playing. These players will sunk hundreds to thousands of hours and dollars into that game. That makes them reluctant to leave it to start the cycle over again in a new title. Plus the biggest issue that publishers seem to ignore is that GaaS games are time sinks. Players aren't able to play more couple seriously at one time. This leaves the players less time to play other titles. It's like none of these publishers remember the MMORPG bubble. All these studios were trying to tap into the success of Everquest thenWoW's subsequent massive success. The end result of that being a multitude of failed games and folded studios.