Simon

"Marathon killed Destiny" or in a much, much longer format: - Content Vault/engine upgrade: Lost story content/favourite activities and weapons gone. Player investment soured. - Sony buying Bungie for $3.6B, at a major peak for Destiny with Witch Queen - The following expansion Lightfall being a major bomb and misstep which was the result of shuffling expansion/story plans - This expansion was what they were banking on being an even further success to finance their other two projects in development at the time. - First Bungie layoffs in Oct 2023, revenue for Destiny fallen by 45%. Destiny Final Shape delayed 6 months, Marathon delayed to 2025 (at the time) - Second round of Bungie layoffs 1 month after Final Shape. Pete Parsons CEO at the time saying they had to make the decision after exhausting all other mitigation options. (What they didn't know yet is he was enjoying that inflated Bungie sale to Sony, buying a whole plethora of classic cars to enjoy while he fired hundreds of devs. but yes, all other options exhausted). - Resulted in unannounced Bungie game transitioning to a new studio under Playstation. - Creative Studios arm of Bungie moved into Playstation to help support other Sony live service. The next big Destiny thing Payback, was cancelled. Big Bungie names laid off. - These two layoffs took Bungie from 1600 employees to about 850. - Sexual harassment accusations against the at the time Marathon game director Christopher Barrett, he is fired. - Oct 2024 Red War plagarism lawsuit, dude says the narrative is lifted from work he wrote on wordpress in 2013/2014. the content is vaulted they can't access it. YouTube footage of the campaign is insiffucient. Nov 2025 they reach an undisclosed settlement. - May 2025 art plagarism with Antireal. Art she created in 2017 were found within the beta of Marathon as art assets. Bungie confirmed a former dev had used the art without permission, promising to work with Antireal to correct it and performed a full evaluation of art in Marathon to verify originality. Antireal was satisfied with the outcome they reached. Marathon delayed indefinitely at this time, with a mention of releasing within that fiscal year. - This was, and still is massively overblown to "every single part of Marathon" being plagarised, and the misinformation surrounding this is staggering and genuinely put a knife in the game's chest. This was a consequence of mass layoffs resulting in a new creative team and this team not knowing where this art came from, and one shitty dev really dealt Bungie yet another shitty hand. - Edge of Fate launches under expectations due to such baggage from these events including company management/morale, questionable decisions like the content vault and not having any onboarding for new players at all essentially only being able to cater to existing players, unable to grow the game's population as there was no fucking cohesive story, as it got vaulted. The new expansion is bad, removes things that worked, added things that didn't, and the new game director is a long term bungie employee but also hermit who just does not speak to the community, even now with it's end of life update. - Pete Parsons leaves Bungie while laughing to the bank. - Doing the Avengers Endgame problem and going right into a new phase when people are not excited about more, they needed to build the excitement again over time. Edge of Fate comes out like a wet fart and the next thing we get after that is the Star Wars crossover, this was not what Destiny needed in order to continue even if it was good. Bungie fucked up a lot, had harbored a lot of ill will and sitting with an overall soured fanbase with a decade's worth of already very demanding fans who at times were rightfully upset and over times completely not, PLUS shit that wasn't within their control to handle so piled on even further and gave the hateful crowd so much ammo that Marathon was plagued the whole time and still is. Bungie also under fire for "abandoning Destiny" but they just simply couldn't right this ship due to so many circumstances and then players leaving in droves therefore of course they will focus on their new game to try ensure a success, as that doesn't have 10+ years of baggage and it is something that needs to keep Bungie going and now we are where we are. It isn't fucking dmg's fault for being a community manager and being excited about the future of Destiny and wanting to see it thrive. WE ALL WANT THAT, BUNGIE INCLUDED! But multiple mistakes, unforeseen challenges and a lot of fucking money get in the way of this "momentum". You can't build momentum when you're one foot in mud, and the crowd supposed to be cheering you on are throwing rocks at you. The absolute batshit takes I've seen from the community is a mixture of shameful, childish and often bordering on straight up psychotic. But yeah, "Marathon killed Destiny."