#Destiny is taken by its developer studio #Bungie - their new blog post "Our Destiny" promising, that the era of great publishers is over, as well as their partnership with #Activision. And its time to take control over own projects.

They're trying to be polite, but the tension between studio and publisher is obvious and horrible in this case. Activision tried to force Bungie to make Destiny series as their second Call of Duty (releasing new games every year or two).

https://www.bungie.net/en/Explore/Detail/News/47569

One of the craziest parts: people who were fired from Bungie will lose some of their shares that will be reverted the same as they would if they quit by their will.

#PlayStation #Bungie #Business #Finance

The company lost over Bungillion $$ due to these refunds!

Literally 3 folks from Russia refunded it in total so far.

#PlayStation@GameDEV
#Bungie@GameDEV

Doubt GIF: the guy who literally stole as is the design of another artist and didn't inform him in any way, is proud now.

Yes, they literally took the whole color palette of the game from a poster maker fella, then also cut his posters to in-game icons, textures, and UI elements.

#Bungie@GameDEV
#PlayStation@GameDEV

After the art director of Marathon was fired, the company proudly announced a way more generic look of the game. Since alpha, they mostly got rid of toon shader and now it's Apex Legends 2 kind of thing.

Do you prefer the new look?
#Bungie@GameDEV
#PlayStation@GameDEV
#ArtDirection@GameDEV

Marathon free Beta gained over 140K CCU on Steam and quickly lowered to around 50K. The players are generally impressed with the polished shooting mechanics. So, a good game, right? Not quite!

The art direction is questionable and hard to use — the navigation patterns in the environment, the characters, etc. It's all over the place.

The overall gameplay loop is considered to be bland in contrast to the art direction.

#Bungie@GameDEV
#Multiplayer@GameDEV
#PlayStation@GameDEV

The demo of Marathon is failing to retain players. And it's a free run of a generally paid game. As of now, nothing indicates that sales will be good. People have tried it — PlayStation fans, Bungie fans, but they didn't get the point.

My bet: 5-10K online upon paid release. What do you think?

#PlayStation@GameDEV
#Bungie@GameDEV
#Multiplayer@GameDEV

The free Marathon demo is losing players daily. Unlike many other games, it failed to bounce back during the weekend and by Monday dipped to 18K (against 143K on its first day). That's 87% loss in less than a week.

The final game is planned to be paid and it doesn't look good for Bungie and Sony.

#Bungie@GameDEV
#Multiplayer@GameDEV
#PlayStation@GameDEV

Marathon just reached the 4th spot among top sellers on Steam, while Rainbow Six Siege lost letter X in its name and now (freaking how?) on the third spot.

Apparently, gamers are not getting wiser...

#Steam@GameDEV
#Bungie@GameDEV
#Ubisoft@GameDEV

Don't blame greedy publishers and lazy developers if 80000 people decided to hop into Marathon upon release...

#Bungie@GameDEV
#PlayStation@GameDEV

There are quite some doubts about Marathon, so let's summarise:

1. It's a generally good game with horrible UI/UX that slows it by a mile. Bungie sorted out maps, shooting, and teamplay.

2. The game was made for $250M (before marketing). And according to multiple sources is being mostly played on PC (Steam) with constantly falling CCU.

The game is paid but the initial batch of users was not meeting the quota to pay off the production budget even remotely.

PlayStation and Bungie are in superposition: they expected it to be much worse to simply cut the loss and fire everyone. But it got some attention too big to make this decision right away. But it's also not good enough to keep everyone so layoffs are imminent.

Morale: your game can't cost 2.5 GTA V budgets and aim for just a million people. Also, UI/UX fixes could be much cheaper than this outcome.

#PlayStation@GameDEV
#Bungie@GameDEV
#UIUX@GameDEV

A very good take on duality:
- Looks good for active players
- Looks bad for bosses at SONY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6mJfpERH0s
#Bungie@GameDEV
#Multiplayer@GameDEV

Still standing

#Bungie@GameDEV
#Multiplayer@GameDEV

Several analytical agencies suggested that marathon revenue is just about $55M, compared to the budget of over $250M (before marketing and support).

Most of the people are playing on Steam, there was a small boost about 2 weeks after the release when people got curious and bought more premium upgrades. But since then the revenue plummeted.

Analytics noted that despite the support from PlayStation, the game is simply too hard for consoles. It makes people leave much earlier (at about 16 hours for active players on PS5, compared to 28 hours on PC).

#Bungie@GameDEV
#PlayStation@GameDEV

With daily peak at less than 30K and dips to less than 10K, Marathon retain a noticeable audience but it's obviously going down.

They will not shut it down, I guess. But it will get a small but passionate team to support the game further. It stays at about 50-70 spot of Steam Top Sellers, so the cash flow is fairly sustainable. The math will work if the team will be much smaller than now.

#Bungie@GameDEV
#PlayStation@GameDEV

Something tells me it ain't gonna end well 🤔

#Bungie@GameDEV
#PlayStation@GameDEV