Destiny 2 has released its final update, Monument of Triumph, which will be the last content addition to the game, as live updates will cease. Sony is walking away from the franchise, and Bungie will now face a number of challenges from here. Hopefully not insurmountable ones, and the biggest needs to be making Marathon a success.
The main issues now are:
1) Bungie does not have another game besides Marathon greenlit yet for devs to work on.
2) The shuttering of Destiny 2 is very likely to lead to significant layoffs.
3) Many devs have already been moved over to Marathon, but they are starting from behind the 8-ball.
Much ado has been made that this recent update rocketed Destiny 2’s playercount well above Marathon’s all-time metrics, at least on Steam, though the comparison at Monument of Triumph launch is a bit different, as the update was free and you would, of course, expect the final update of an 11-year-old game players have played for thousands of hours would draw a crowd.
In truth, Destiny 2 has already been outperforming Marathon for a while now, due to the fact that Steam metrics don’t tell the whole story. Even if the visible numbers are even, Destiny 2 has a 4:1 console playerbase while Marathon is 2:1 in favor of PC, so it’s even more skewed.
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This, of course, has spawned a lot of anger among Destiny fans who believe that it was “killed” in favor of Marathon, and while there is certainly something to be said about diversion of resources, it’s a bit more complicated. Destiny 2 is a notoriously high-cost game due to the sheer amount of content it puts out, and if it stops putting that content out often enough, as seen this past year, the playerbase flees. And the prospect of a much-wanted Destiny 3 sequel could cost as much as $500 million, according to some estimates, given rising industry costs. Marathon, though no game is cheap these days, will not cost as much to run as a live PvP game that adds far less per season.
The hole is deep, however. With Destiny 2 gone, Marathon is now Sony’s highest-profile live-service game, with so many others dead or unreleased, and successes like Helldivers 2 made with third-party partnerships. That puts an immense amount of pressure on Marathon to lead Sony’s struggling live service charge, and the fate of Bungie as a whole could be in its hands.
The main problem is getting people to show up. Marathon underperformed at launch, and things have not improved from there. That has been particularly noticeable this past week, which featured both the launch of its second season with lots of new, positive changes, and the release of a free week that was extended to 10 days, and ends this afternoon.
It hasn’t been pretty. Despite that combination, Marathon’s recent launch didn’t get half the peak of its paid launch, and players dropped over the course of the weekend, rather than rose with more time on gamers’ hands. As it stands, by the end of this free week, the game is down over 50% from the start of the week, though that was not helped by Destiny 2’s Monument of Triumph launch.
Marathon needs these numbers to improve, badly. This is why various stops are being pulled out, including earlier progression and attempts to draw in new players, though that has resulted in high-end players sprinting toward amazing gear almost instantly. There are experiments with free kit modes where players risk essentially nothing in the extraction shooter, and the recent release of what effectively was a PvE mode, which was not originally planned for season 2. A more involved PvE mode is coming. The plan now seems to be to expand Marathon’s vision to be more inclusive of different types of players, though that is a long-term project.
Sony has publicly backed Marathon since its last earnings report, even as it continues to take hundreds of millions of impairment losses against Bungie. The game is not in imminent danger of shutting down, but the demands on its performance are oppressive, and the game should never have been in this position as a much more niche title than something like Destiny. This was not well planned by Sony, and Bungie is now tasked with an enormous amount of work to make Marathon more popular than it was ever intended to be.
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