Bite my shiny metal cockpit!

You implied I thought it was gonna get shut down when I had already made it clear I wasn't referring to that and was talking about the impact on its long term support instead. If you agree that Marathon is off to a concerning start then I dunno what the point of all this is.

That's false. The one you shared did not have the part about a 75 million dollar estimate not being that far off. That's additional context since it means it might be under 100 million whereas before it could've been 150 million. For Marathon Bungie is a much bigger studio than Embark. Since July 2024 they've had over 800 employees, had over 1300 from October 2023 till then and over 1600 before then. Embark has under 400 in comparison and is a Swedish studio so the average salary there should be lower than it is for the American Bungie.

Are you really unable to comprehend the Steam concurrent players chart properly? The notion that it's been hovering from 25-30k for weeks is either an extremely blatant lie or you can't understand the data since last week was the first time its peaks dropped under 30k. Yes it was slightly higher Saturday than Friday. That's completely normal since people have more free time on Saturday on average. That's why you compare week on week like I did. And I already went into why the Arc Raiders situation is different. It dropping now after being stable for a few months and selling over 10 million is completely different from Marathon's first few weeks. Unless you're somehow arguing that Arc Raiders hasn't been a massive success then I really don't know what you're doing here.

In regards to the Marathon budget it should be noted that only 300 people at peak development time worked on Marathon. Before the layoffs, when Bungie had 1200 people, it was even less than 300. Project Payback got cancelled in June 2024 and the whole team got moved onto Marathon at that point. 

The Marathon budget is probably not a big as people have been calculating as there seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding about the game being a large core development for Bungie when in reality it appears to have been more of a side project that got kicked into primary place when other projects got cancelled and they chose to run with Marathon. Even then the majority of the studio are working on something else. 

In regards to the Marathon budget it should be noted that only 300 people at peak development time worked on Marathon. Before the layoffs, when Bungie had 1200 people, it was even less than 300. Project Payback got cancelled in June 2024 and the whole team got moved onto Marathon at that point. 

The Marathon budget is probably not a big as people have been calculating as there seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding about the game being a large core development for Bungie when in reality it appears to have been more of a side project that got kicked into primary place when other projects got cancelled and they chose to run with Marathon. Even then the majority of the studio are working on something else. 

I hope these roughly 20,000 players will last until the second season (the declines haven't been significant for the past three weeks, though they're still slight, so maybe the game will stabilize its player base at around 15,000-20,000).

The game is fantastic, and I wholeheartedly hope it survives and even thrives. The constant online bashing doesn't make it any easier, and the constant display of Steam charts ultimately only discourages new players. But I hope the game survives because it deserves much, much more.