Marathon Pivot, Destiny 2 Pressure, Bungie's Bad Management

[Music] all right I'm back with another Destiny 2 video and not the one I thought it would be making again yesterday I did the As across email where I was like H I don't know about this uh and then I was going to talk about into the light today since we had the big reveal stream but now we have a new controversy um based on an IGN article that just went up uh I personally do not think is connected to the as email as there was essentially no overlap between them other than just sort of General bad vibes but uh the IGN article is something to take very seriously it's by Rebecca Valentine she's very good at sourcing she's very good at this kind of thing um very important to follow all of this to figure out what's going on it is overwhelmingly bad worrisome confusing news uh it has to do with both Marathon Destiny 2 and I guess bunge as a whole and well it is sort of a continuation of past bad news we've heard there's some new things in here that I don't know are worse I guess things are not improving to say the least okay so I'm I'm not going to like just fully read through this like word for word you should go read it yourself I really it's it's tough when so much news is made in one article I did not write because I both need to cover it but I also want to give full credit to that article and have people read it so go read it um this does start with the big Marathon announcement that uh Joe Ziggler has replaced Chris Barrett as the game director of marathon the weird thing about this is that the original IGN article makes it sound like this just happened um there's no mention of a timeline for this it says IGN learned he is being replaced by former bant game director but before this article ran Joe Ziggler took to Twitter to announce that for the last nine months he's been working on Marathon as game director and that they're going to show stuff soon um I really hate when when places do this where IGN asked them for comments and then they didn't comment and then they just put out a tweet undercutting the article that was about to come out to try and get ahead of it I think it's kind of a dick move but it happens all the time um but he's he's saying here that he was he's been director for nine months nine months ago is it's like June 2023 and if you'll recall Marathon was red I think it was it May 23rd 2023 and that was a video that featured Chris Barrett very heavily as game director and they were debuting the whole thing and then this timeline means that anywhere from a couple weeks to a month later he was replaced as game director by Joe Joe Ziggler and Ziggler is uh a the former game director of valence who uh is valoren or VOR I always get this wrong um who uh started with Bungie in 2022 and we didn't really know what he was doing Barrett obviously would have been working on Marathon a long time before the reveal but I don't know something weird happened there the the article cites this as him being removed it now says he is executive Creator creative director at Bungie which sounds like a Luke Smith Mark nosworthy type promotion into some highlevel unspecified job where we don't know what he's doing uh yeah we'll go more into leadership but so that's kind of weird the good news is that from what I've heard everybody likes Joe Ziggler everybody likes working with him which is good um but then we transition into more bad news where this article uh also says that because of the change um uh they are pouring resources to get marathan out the door but under Ziggler's New leadership the it is shifting from a game that has customizable player characters to a selectable cast of Heroes if everybody hates this it is hard to understate just how much negativity I have seen about the idea of marathon moving from Custom characters to being some sort of hero shooter extractor instead um it stands to reason obviously that with Zigler as game director he comes from uh valorent valerent and that is made up of Heroes entirely so maybe that's something he's more comfortable with there are successful Hero games that the most notable of which right now are probably uh valerant and Apex and OverWatch kind of started all this to a certain extent I mean Team Fortress started it but you know what I mean like OverWatch is sort of the modern era of this although it's struggling quite a bit now the problem here is that what is the audience they're going after here now what one idea is that they're trying to different differentiate themselves from tarov which do not have like a hero character thing so they're like okay or an extraction game or not like tarov we're different we have Heroes but then you leap into this situation where if you're relying on like a good chunk of the destiny Community which likes Bungie which even likes Bungie PVP to head over to Marathon that was already kind of a tall order because you're asking them to switch uh from Destiny a very you know specifically crafted PVE and pvep game to Marathon and and a PVP extraction shooter but now you're doing it with hero characters which bung is never done a hero shooter before Destiny 2 Destiny 1 and two are all about player customization that is like the core of the whole game is making your own guardian or Trio of Guardians uh to be your custom character custom looks custom build your favorite weapons blah blah blah when you get to Hero shooter territory then you have to become like a main of whoever and you have usually how this works is a set you know period of a set uh range of skills that you have that are all kind of the same you often will have a set weapon um and well you might be able to customize some things here there depending on the game uh it is overwhelmingly based on just sort of set hero kits with with relatively little customization so trying to get a bunch of Destiny players to move from that to a hero extraction game nobody seems really interested in that I'm not going to rule out the possibility that like perhaps this is not as bad as it sounds perhaps there is a really interesting Twist on this they're doing that could still be a lot of fun maybe there is some level of customiz a here that wouldn't be you know maybe is something as super fixed as as an OverWatch or something uh but I get certainly why people are upset about it and then so if if you're not really going after Destiny players with this who are you going after like the extraction Market is pretty small it's tarov and now we have hell divers which is technically an extraction game but it's a PVE extraction game which is not at all the same and then you have the hero shooter crowd where valerin is more like csgo style OverWatch is arcadey and Apex is a battle royale and this is none of those things but like I don't I don't know what the audience is here and I think they're really really going to have a bit of a tough time searching for an audience for this game unless it is just unequivocally freaking amazing and the best shooter you've ever played and like genre Heroes don't matter it's just it must be played uh no idea if that's going to be how it is but I understand why people are very upset about the idea of it moving to a hero shooter and why that that kills interest for a lot of people based on sort of hero shooter fatigue even if we are still seeing successful hero Shooters in the market it does feel like Trend chasing to a certain extent which say what you will about Destiny 2 it has not really done a lot of trend chasing uh I would say compared to um competition and people have been trying to chase Destiny 2 and have almost all failed at doing that so I don't know hero stuff is is very skeptical it draws a lot of skepticism which I understand um so that's a lot of the marathon stuff there's news in here that matter their their previous game that was mentioned has been canceled twice first in 2020 and then in 202 2022 again which they tried to rework it gummy bears that game that they got mentioned briefly still exists but is like apparently it's on ice because of all the other crap happening a bunge right now so don't think that is anything like a timeline don't necessarily know if that will even make it out uh so we'll see the most worrisome part in this is almost everyone a Bungie appears to be worried that more layoffs are going to be coming after the final shape uh in order to you know offset costs for a budget where quote nothing adds up according to someone who knows about budgets at Bungie it is pretty rare to have someone who like knows the internal financials of a company at that high of a level speak to a reporter and say something like nothing adds up in terms of the budget of your studio as someone who does reporting like this it is pretty rare to get that kind of information um you know so good on Valentine but it also speaks to sort of Defcon level you know Panic inside the company to a certain extent if that is being spoken about and the idea is that uh something will have to curb cost after the final shape unless the final shape does just extraordinarily extremely well and makes bazillions of dollars and then they need that to cover the Gap until releases I've spoken about this this period of time many times in the past where it's just kind of [ __ ] like my my rare use of strong language here but like the final shap pre-orders are low I don't see anything surging that in the next couple of months here uh I don't agree with that one analysis from a while ago where it's like they're 25% of you know light follow like it's not going to be like that bad but it I don't imagine this is going some sort of Sky High you know return to the game for bazillions of players or and like I just don't think it's going to perform at the level that they need it to to consider it some sort of wild success to you know Bridge the revenue Gap save jobs as nice as that would be um that seems unlikely and then what does seem likely is a huge player drop off after the final shape because it's is supposed to be the concluding chapter of the light and darkness Saga so many people may be trying to you know see that to the end see Destiny 2 or destiny 1 really the whole franchise to an end by at least getting through that expansion but then they're going to leave and do other things if they haven't left already and there is more Destiny content coming we know about episodes you know right after that but those are disconnected stories that are still Seasons even though they're not calling them seasons and I I don't know if that's going to be enough to get players to stick around it feels like there's going to be a huge fallof and then you have this unspecified period of time between June 2024 when final shape comes out and sometime in 2025 when marathon is supposed to come out and really needs to come out because there needs to be um something bringing in Revenue the problem is there's no guarantee that marathon is going to be some sort of Mega hit as we've just discussed I didn't mention this but I also think the pivot to Heroes may be a monetization ploy where games like valerant games like Apex um not only can you sell really pricey skins for them 20 $25 skins uh they have these you know crazy high microtransaction paths where um I don't know all the prices but like valerant has weapon skin bottles for like 100 bucks I think you can upgrade them all the way to like something cost 300 bucks total there's heirlooms in Apex Legends where trying to pull for those can cost hundreds of dollars I'm not super intimately involved in these games but I know that these things can really add up so if they're trying to do stuff like that in Destiny for these sort of the ability to do these huge macro transactions that may be something that they're trying to go after too but again no guarantees that that's going to work and no there's no information about the future of Destiny 2 here past what what has already been announced they're just sort of talking about the final shape Revenue as a bridge to Marathon not to say Destiny 2 is going to stop that is not at all what Bungie has said they've in fact said the opposite but there's no information in here about what's happening um there so obviously all Bungie struggles always come back to leadership fans are sick of leadership bunge employees are sick of leadership and are very angry at leadership sometimes specific people within leadership that I don't really want to just name here cuz I don't know if that's appropriate but most people know who the general leaders of Bungie are now the report in here says that senior company leadership will leave in droves uh in the summer of 2026 is that's when the final payouts from the Sony acquisition comes in and their idea is they're going to get Marathon out get out with their money and then leave someone else to deal with the mess that remains of trying to get people to stick with Marathon or trying to get people to you know still play Destiny they're just going to peace out so that's shitty like that's really shitty of them but not unexpected given uh you know everything we know about leadership at the present moment this could be good news um you know if if someone internal within Bungie ascends and takes the Reigns uh and you know has a better vision for Destiny and Bungie as a whole and people don't hate them like that could be good if Sony takes over which seems likely if not or possible if not likely there could be better leadership there in theory that's that's better in the way of now um I just don't think that they're going to do this like oh Sony's just going to scrap Bungie and sell them for parts or you know dissolve them into their other live projects that seems even with all the issues that seems unlikely it may be a much smaller Studio going forward it may cut back on a lot of these future incubation projects that are really going nowhere and it may just turn to be sort of balancing Destiny and Marathon for a really long time um I would be surprised if just Bungie didn't exist completely if they were still independent maybe but Sony I don't is is as annoyed as they may be with how all this has gone it's hard for me to for see that happening we'll see again like shortterm here is a lot of bad news but longterm I don't think we can make any full judgments yet about the long-term fate of the company because if leadership does leave leadership is replaced marathon is a hit Destiny does find its footing again I I don't think we can just write everything off it's a very bad moment right now it's probably going to be a very bad moment after the final shape no matter what the quality of the final shape is I think it's going to be a bad year at least after that but long term we'll see um that's I think that's mostly it uh one piece Sony has left the studio to sort out its own troubles was not responsible for the layoffs and Pete Parsons took responsibility which we kind of already knew that and that was back when they said leadership was not going to take pay cuts I did hear leadership took some cuts for like bonuses or something but I I don't know it wasn't you know what needed to be done certainly uh so yeah the the main point of new information here is the marathon game director thing which is pretty weird it's that's a very weird situation with the timeline and the failure to announce that you've had a new game director in one of your most important projects for the past nine months I guess I get I get why they want wouldn't want to debut marathon and then three weeks later be like by the way Chris Barrett's out and uh you know Joe Ziggler's in because that's very weird and would raise a lot of questions still raising a lot of questions now honestly because I would love to know what happened there perhaps we'll find out later but um yeah and then I think the the idea that it's going to be potentially a hero shooter as the new direction of the game is pretty problematic from in a lot of ways uh we could I'll be wrong it could be amazing but it's certainly um something that is easy to be skeptical about so that's my take on this whole thing again go read the article uh maybe tomorrow I'll finally get to talk about into the light I did write an article about it yesterday but this is more pressing news I would say so anyway thanks for watching and I'll talk to you soon take care