Bungie’s Future Is Balanced On A Knife’s Edge – Can They Survive? – WGB

Marathon game director Joe Ziegler leaving Bungie does not, in itself, mean that the company is in trouble. People are leaving jobs. Maybe you got a great offer somewhere, looking for a change or you just decided that spending several years as a photographer was enough to capture the background for one lifetime.

But nothing going on at Bungie is isolated right now.

Ziegler is leaving Marathon four months after its launch, at a time when the sport is in dire need of growth. Assistant game director Del Chafe III is stepping up to take his place alongside art director Julia Nardin, so Bungie at least has some experience people ready to take control.

Still, losing the person who oversaw Marathon’s development and launch isn’t fair when the game’s future is so closely tied to Bungie’s.

And right now, the numbers don’t look good.

At the time of writing, Marathon has a 24-hour peak of 6,435 concurrent players on SteamDB, down from a peak of 88,337. That’s a huge drop for a live service game that only launched in March.

What makes it worse is that Season 2 launched in early June, bringing a new map, weapons, enemies, progression changes and gameplay modes. It briefly pushed Marathon’s Steam numbers back to 30,000–40,000, giving Bungie a much-needed glimmer of hope.

Unfortunately, that bump disappeared as quickly as it came. The game is now back to peak at just over 6,000 players per day.

Steam numbers never tell the whole story because Marathon is also available on PlayStation and Xbox. However, previous estimates from Alinea Analytics suggested that 68% of Marathon sales were on Steam, compared to only 19% on PlayStation 5 and 13% on Xbox.

Paul Tassi was also told by sources that the console audience “doesn’t care about this stuff.”

Assuming those estimates are accurate, Steam is not a small portion of Marathon’s audience. It is a very important game platform so it is a strong gauge of its entire life. And that gauge is now burning and sparking.

Maybe Bungie can turn things around. The studio is adding more PvE-focused experiences and Marathon has received a positive reception from many people who have stuck with it. The live service games have bounced back from a poor launch and previously low player count. And Bungie says they intend to support the game for the foreseeable future.

But Marathon doesn’t have the luxury of quietly finding its feet over the course of several years. Bungie needs it to work now because they are in a tough spot.

Sony recently cut 292 jobs at Bungie’s Bellevue office, with layoffs affecting most of the Destiny team and even some people working on Marathon. Including the latest cuts, Bungie has reportedly lost more than 600 employees in three rounds of layoffs since Sony bought the company in 2022.

Sony also took two bankruptcy losses against Bungie worth about $765 million in total. In plain English, Sony has repeatedly looked at the studio it paid $3.6 billion for and concluded that it is no longer worth as much as expected.

Destiny 2 has now received its final live service content update, ending active development after nearly nine years, much to the chagrin of many gamers. Ironically, the announcement that Destiny 2 would not be getting any new content brought players back to their communities, the kind of numbers the game really needed to keep it alive over the past year or two. Shame they didn’t get to where it matters.

You might think that would free up Bungie to start work on Destiny 3, but according to a previous report, Destiny 3 is neither productive nor bright. Bungie reportedly doesn’t have another game approved in active development, either. There are ideas in the works and projects sitting in the vague world of “early incubation,” but nothing concrete can take over if Marathon can’t keep the lights on.

That leaves Bungie in a dire situation. The established money maker is no longer receiving new content. Its staff has been greatly reduced. Sony has repeatedly written down its value. Its new game lost most of its players within four months, and the person who directed that game has left the company. Oh, and whatever new project they come up with probably won’t be released until after 2030.

Sony will probably continue to give the Marathon time to find an audience. It cost a lot of money for Bungie to pull the plug without trying everything first, and there’s still a lot of value in Destiny’s name, Bungie’s technology and talent left at the studio.

But patience never ends, especially after hundreds of millions of dollars in impairment losses and several rounds of layoffs.

Unless Marathon can stabilize its audience and start growing again, it’s hard to imagine Sony continuing to fund Bungie as a major independent developer while waiting years for another project to emerge from incubation.

That doesn’t mean Bungie is shutting down tomorrow. But between Marathon’s falling numbers, the lack of another game in production and the massive amount of cuts that have already been made, the future of one of the most prominent games studios now seems to be on a knife’s edge. Are we looking at a world without Bungie? And would that be worse than a world where we have Bungie being a pale shadow of its former self?

It’s a bad time to be a fan of this industry, isn’t it? Many historic and iconic studios are under threat right now. Sad times, my friends. Sad times.