Kinda Funny Gamescast: Video Game Podcast - Marathon Delayed! Bungie Doomed? - Kinda Funny Gamescast

Episode Date: June 17, 2025

Go to http://shadyrays.com and use code FUNNY to get 35% off polarized sunglasses. Thank you for the support! Run of Show - - Start - Housekeeping - Topic of the Show: Marathon Delayed! Bungie Doomed? - Maybe this isn’t bad news? - Ads - Is Marathon as far gone as Suicide Squad was at its delay? - Is Bungie Doomed? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What's up everybody? Welcome to the Kind of Funny Games cast for Tuesday, June 17th, 20, 25. I'm one of your host, Greg Miller all along. Sorry, the master of hype, snow, bike, Mike. Greg, thanks for getting me off the desk and getting me over to this desk. We got some breaking news, ladies, gentlemen, NBs. We got to jump right on it. Of course, he's Forbes 30 under 30, aka the second best baby blues in San Francisco, aka game showdown season three second place at Tim Gettys. Lots him host. And of course,

he's rolling them shoulders. This is what it's like when you see Michael Jordan coming off the bench. He's taking off the world doing it.

He's the Hispanic Carthrope Texas Truton, Latino. He's clicking heads and ripping him to shreds. The globe trotting head shot and three-point

shooting rootin-tooting Nitro rifle from Twitch. Dot TV. Andy Cortez. Man, Alan Parses' project.

It's really rocking that song. It may have been the only song they wrote, I believe. Wow. I mean, why? After you do that, like, there's no going up or down.

It was just is. It was a commission from Michael Jordan. It was that thing where after the Joker came out and they did the celebration Bull's song, bra-brum-brum. Oh, right, right. And everybody was like, why are they using that? That song was done by a pedophile. I'm like, I don't know anything about Chicago Bulls music anymore, and I will not engage in this

discussion. I don't know what's happening. I don't take away that 90, that 90s run for me. You know what I mean? Monsters out there. Of course, like I said, there's breaking news about Bungie, about Marathon. That games really. tiptoed in and we said, you know what, we make the rules here, kind of funny, we can pivot,

we can be nimble, let's go for it. So this is the Kind of Funny Games cast, each and every week to end a variety of platforms. We run you through the biggest topics in video games that we need to talk about. They could be reviews, previews, or breaking news. It'll always be covered here live on Twitch. dot TV slash Kind of Funny Games, YouTube.com slash Kind of Funny games, and of course podcast services around the globe. If you love what we do, it Kind of Funny as an 11-person small business all about live shows. Make sure you pick up that kind of funny membership. YouTube.com slash kind of funny games, Patreon.com slash kind of funny, Apple or Spotify, you give us $10 a month. We give you 80 episodes of content, ad free, and four hours of exclusive podcasting each and every day in 15 to 20

minute chunks from me, Greg Miller in a series we call Greg Way. Most importantly, you get the show with no ads, but no big deal if you got no money to toss our way. You can get it for free. Twitch.tv.tv.tv.com slash kind of funny games. Apple, Spotify, every other podcast service. If you're watching live, like I see Matthew Red Hudson 8 Lucid Dream, of course, frolicious 2595, I fucking got it, Andy. Okay. They get a meddandy for first time. I said I got it, Andy! With Prime. Go over to YouTube.com slash Kind of Funny Games and answer the super chat question, is Bungie cooked? I want to know if you think they got guys in the tank, do you care about

marathon? Is that game having shot? Oh, we have a lot to cover, and we will get all. into it momentarily. Of course, like I said, you already got games daily, which was supposed to be a pretty easy episode about, hey, look at some of these Xbox things and the OSs and the handheld stuff. And then it was like, well, now, hold on a second. They just put out a video saying their partner in over here with AMD for next gen consoles. Wait, what does that mean? Well, okay, well, at least we got through that. All of a sudden, marathons are delayed. A lot of stuff. A lot of stuff going on. And we couldn't do without your support. Thank you. You can get that games daily. Like I said, YouTube.com slash kind of funny games podcast services.

after the games cast you're getting a sponsored Nvidia FBC Fire Break Break Stream. That's what they wrote. Followed by Jack and Daxter with Barrett and Blessing. If you're a kind of funny member, today's Greg Way is 20 plus minutes on why you shouldn't have a kid unless

You like that? I put the dot, that, dot, dot, dot that. And of course, later today is the kind of funny happy hour for our $25 and above supporters on patreon.com. It's kind of funny. Of course, you get to call in, talk to us for a private podcast. It's great. I ran off the hitch too, all right?

I'm Bill Cartwright, man in the middle over here. I love that. Thank you to our Patreon, producers, Carl Jacobs, Omega Buster, and Delaney Twining. Today we're brought to you by Shady Rays, but we'll tell you about that later. For now, let's begin the show with whatever, what is and forever will be the topic of the show. Tots, dots, dots, dot, dot, dot, so, Timothy. Yes. Did you think you were going to get through Games Daily with just one breaking new segment?

No. Is there more? No. Oh. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that was crazy. Yeah, that was a lot. And obviously this news, oh, it was weird because I feel like we've talked about this sometime in the last week about marathon status. And there was question of like, did it already get delayed officially? Did it not? Like, where are we at? Yeah. And not being at the state of play, all that stuff. Right. So now, okay, cool, officially getting delayed. But all they're saying is it's delayed out of the September 23rd date they had. We don't know when it's coming out. So that is the question of the hour for all of us to answer. And is this good news? Is this bad news? I have thoughts. You want to know my thoughts real quick? He's got thoughts.

I want to get through the update. Then I want to read the update because it is breaking news. Maybe people are seeing this for the first time. The update from bungee.net reads, thank you not only for your passionate feedback around the marathon, reveal, and alpha play test, but also for your patience while we took the time to listen closely and chart our next steps. Through every comment and real-time conversation on social media and Discord, your voice has been strong and clear. We've taken this to heart and we know.

need more time to craft marathon into the game that truly reflects your passion. After much discussion within our dev team, we've made the decision to delay the September 23rd release. The Alpha Test created an opportunity for us to calibrate and focus the game on what will make it uniquely compelling. Survival under pressure, mystery and lore around every corner, raid-like endgame challenges, and Bungie's genre-defining FPS combat. We're using this time to empower the team to create the intense high-stakes experience, that a title, like Marathon, is built around. This means deepening the relationship between the developers

and the game's most important voices, our players. Over the next few months, we'll continue closed testing, parentheses, including participants in the Alpha, to deploy game updates and test new features as they come online. You'll hear from us again later this fall when we can share the progress we've made alongside the game's new release date. Thank you again for your patience

and, much more importantly, your passion. Your continued feedback, will help us make Marathon the incredible gaming experience we all know it can be. Andy Cortez. Hey Greg. You're the Rootin' Tooten,

three-point shooting, head shot and son of a gun out there on Twitch. You've played the Marathon Alpha. Yeah. What did you think, and then what do you read between the lines here? It was clear that this thing is a ways off, especially, you know,

after playing the Arc Raiders, beta and seeing just how much more developed that was, seeing how much more content filled that felt. I still found it fun, but I could absolutely see all of the drawbacks and negatives that the hardcore attraction shooter fan felt when, you know, it's always caught in those, it was always caught in a weird area of too casual

for the hardcore fans and too hardcore of a genre for casual fans. And trying to please everybody was going to, to please nobody, you know? Yeah. I always thought that it was just a weird genre to be in anyway. This was, you know, it was hard for me not to say every sentence. Now, this isn't the game that I would want them to make or this isn't. Yeah, it sucks, right?

It was always like the reality of, man, this would be, this would be one of the coolest settings to exist in as a single player character who creates their own shell and get, you know, gets to discover and explore this world. but trapped in a multiplayer-like experience where me and Mike and Nick had a really fun day with it the first day and then the next day me and Mike were like, let's continue that fun and we streamed it and legitimately died about seven times in a row in about like a 45-minute span and it was like, whoa, this is a complete 180 to how we were feeling yesterday.

I'm not surprised by this, especially after those leaks that were happening about the marketing plans being cancelled for you know and not seeing at the state of play was also kind of damning in the coal mine yeah yeah um yeah it's it's it's a bummer

I don't I'm worried like I'm worried about bungee oh yeah we'll get into that because this isn't you know this isn't just something that you can tune and tweak what people want is something that would take three four

years to develop or whatever and I just don't know. Before we get too far into the weeds on Bungy, because I do want to bring in a number of different articles and I think Paul Tassie has some salient points in his. Michael. Yeah, Greg. I of course want to know what your thoughts on the alpha were if you were surprised

by this information, but I also know so many people are tuning in because of the news. What is Marathon? Marathon is an extraction shooter coming from the, of course, famous and well-known development team of Bungy. I think a lot of people know Bungy from the early Halo days and most importantly, probably their MMO experience with Destiny.

So they're looking at a really acclaimed developer name going, okay, what's that new next thing as Destiny 2 continues to be what Destiny 2 is while also starting to slowly end and maybe ramp up for something different later on. But this is their next big game. And a lot of people were excited. Of course, Marathon is also a title from way back in the day that people will, the old heads will tell you, oh, I remember this. The new kids will say, I don't know even what you're.

talking about. Show up, Gary. It's kind of, it's a new title to a lot of us here. And they chose an extraction shooter, which is a small, kind of interesting genre within the first person shooter genre. So for me, I came out of it actually really enjoying marathon on day one,

similar to what Andy said. It was more up my alley with more clashing and team engagements that felt similar to a battle royale style of intensity and gameplay cycles, but it was lacking in the extraction. shooter moment to moment gameplay, which is what we saw when they took a big right jab, I think from Arc Raiders, right? Both of these games had betas and alphas within the two same weeks. And you could see the momentum from the idea of bungee coming out with the new game.

Oh, it's an extraction shooter. Let's try this to, oh, I'd much rather play this Arc Raiders game. This game isn't good. It's kind of like, you know, when Woody and Buzz met each other. And Andy dropped poor Woody over there. That's how this went. And so, yeah, I think the writing was on the wall. You could tell the audience feedback to Bungee, of course, the stolen assets and the reused arts as Andy and I covered in games daily.

That was just a lot of like, this isn't quite right. This isn't setting up well for a, hey, here's the date. Okay, we'll see you in September. It felt like, hey, we need to hit the brakes on this fast. So for me, I think this is the right call. Now you start to play the game, Greg, right? At the end, we have Arc Raiders on October 30th. No, let me double check that.

Art graders comes out October 30th. We have GTA in May. The world shuts down in May, gaming-wise. So you have a tight window here to say, where do we call our shot? Do we hit this? Or do we wait past May and get away from Grand Theft Auto? And so really going to come down to Sony and Bungee,

how much money do you have? How much can we put into this? How much can we wait? because for me, I think at this point, you're waiting past May, Greg. And I know that's a crazy thing to say, but like you are getting out of the way of our creators at the end of October, which is clearly already eating your lunch. And I am not trying to position myself in, hey, let's drop on February and have a month or two months of excitement and then just dive bomb die because of Grant Theft Auto. It's wild to think that the game was already struggling. The game was already not in the best place.

especially with the beta kind of being really, really botched in a weird way where invites, people weren't being invited and you're looking at, even though you could play this beta on multiple consoles, concurrent steam numbers were hitting triple digits. And it's like, hey, we can let more people in. There's a lot of people waiting to get into this, like allow this to happen, right? And momentum was already not on their side and then the stolen art happened. And it's like, holy shit. You couldn't have asked for a worst thing to happen. to a game that already felt floundering and already felt like it was missing its identity and purpose. Let me bring in an article because we keep mentioning the stolen art. I was going to get to a little bit later, but I want to bring that up so you have a clear picture if you're not up on that news, all right?

We're going to go to Games Radar Plus where Concerran wrote, Moral at Bungy reportedly at an all-time low as the iconic FPS dev investigates stolen assets in Marathon. Quote, the vibes have never been worse, end quote. Morale at Bungy, the iconic first person studio behind Destiny and the Revenue.

original Halo games is reportedly at an all-time low, with some employees unsure about whether their upcoming marathon reboot can meet at September release date, obviously dated now. In case, the scandal hasn't reached you yet. Earlier this week, futuristic indie artist Fern Anti-Real Hook accused the studio of using her 2017 art portfolio as inspiration, parentheses, to put it mildly, for marathon without permission or payment. She also posted side-by-side screenshots of her own artwork next to Marathon's alpha test with very similar iconography, patterns, fonts, and sometimes even words appearing in both. Bungee later admitted that a former artist at the studio had mistakenly, quote, included these

in a texture sheet that was ultimately used in game, end quote, and said it was currently investigating a concern regarding unauthorized use of artist's details, unauthorized use of artis decals. A new Forbes report, signing comments from former and current Bungee staff now give some insight into what's happening inside the studio. Morales said to be in a free fall, quote unquote, and the vibes have never been worse. Higher ups haven't said anything about a delay potentially hitting marathon, but many are uncertain about if the shooter can turn around its controversial perception in time for launch, just a few months away. Game to rest director Joe Ziegler even said the studio was, quote, still scrubbing out our assets to make sure all were being respectful

to the situation, which obviously sounds like a pretty hefty undertaking. For now, Bungee's team and parent company Sony are purportedly also investigating the situation though the fact the studio neglected to show gameplay footage in this week's live stream of course state of play discussing the alpha maybe says enough no the state of the the

live screen they were talking about was the they had like their own and their own and their own and so that day was a very like oh man we got the elephant in the room is the whole all of our shit was stolen and every comment in the Twitch chat was art raters and it was just

like bad vibes all around. So I want to go to Tim, but I want to piggyback off something you said, Andy, that so many people, this isn't the game they wanted. It needs to be from, people would love a ground-up. Guitar Hero Arrow Superchatted,

just like you can on YouTube.com slash Kind of Funny Games and says, keeping extraction focus is only delaying the same outcome IMO. Needs a ground-up refresh with diverse multiplayer suite and ideally a nostalgic solo campaign. Tim, I think this comes back to you

where you were at the top of the show where you wanted to go a bit, big picture with the Tim Getty's take. Yeah. I mean, it's tough. There's a lot of layers to it. I think that the starting place is, I don't think that today's news is bad news.

I don't know that it's good news, but I don't think it's bad. I think this is the best possible thing they can do, which is not release on September 23rd. That is way too soon. It feels like they're not going to have anything answered that we need them to at this point by then. But the question then becomes,

what is the answer? What is the way to change the fact that this is now the third time that we've had a headline and on one of our shows that implies bungee's fucking up and that we don't know if they can fix it in the same type of way we talk about Ubisoft and talk about some of these companies that are clearly like making decisions that aren't viking with the general gaming

audience or the gaming audience of people like us that talk about the business of games. And I think from that perspective, when you're looking at this game, Mike said it so well of what Marathon is and what it is going to need to be to a new generation of people. and all right, cool, PlayStation had Hell Divers last year. They had this mega win on this side of gaming to an extent.

They also had Concord, which we understand was maybe the biggest failure in video game history. Like that is going to be something that we talk about forever. And to this day, it's unbelievable to me. I can't believe they actually pulled that game as quickly as they did. So to look here, it's like, how do you solve this? Because we all sat and we looked at Suicide Squad and we looked at Concord. And going into it, we're all like, like, I don't know.

I don't know. And it's not just a gut feeling. It's like, I don't know because X, Y, Z. And here we are now saying, I don't know. And we have reasons why. And unfortunately, it's an entire alphabet from A to Z with this one. Yeah. And I look at it and Andy's saying that he thinks that giving this game more time,

giving it the more modes and all of that. Mike was backing this up too. Like, there's something here. And I believe that. I totally do. I think that yes, like kind of restart this game. there is potential for marathon, a bungee marathon that is not just on PlayStation 5, but it's also on PC and also on Xbox, and it is crossplay.

That can succeed for sure. But at this point, I don't think that's the move. I don't think that that's possible. Is the answer figuring out a new strategy financially? It's free to play. They come up with micro-transactions somehow. They try their best to just make money from what they have because this is what they have. The reality is they're probably going to have to go through,

legal battles with the artist and whether legal battles just means here's some hush money. They're actively going to lose even more money for this. Who knows what that looks like in the grand scheme of things? But that's all just bad vibes, bad news, and I think it just combines to a place of is Bungy doomed?

Doomed to be fully put under PlayStation and not have any autonomy? Yes. Doomed as a company? I'm not so sure about that. Is marathon doomed? Absolutely. I think that they need to come up with some way to say, this and it's looking very doubtful in my opinion. I think, yeah, I have so much more to dive into and go into this, but I think this is

exactly, I mean, this is what's happening with Fair Games and Haven Studios, I believe, except they just didn't, they were, they're further down their timeline and when they were supposed to announce to show more stuff. I think you're seeing right here, PlayStation does not want another Concord, period. I think they're going to end up killing this in the crib as well. And I think exactly what you're saying, Tim, it's going to be cool. we're killing Marathon and bungee's being absorbed into

PlayStation Studios and whoever's still there, whatever's still going on there's going on, there's going to be layoffs, I'm sure all these other things. There's layoffs when things are going well. Right. Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. Like when Destiny 2 the Final Shape comes out and it's great review and then it's insane that

that's how we just kind of expect that and things will likely just get worse. In the super chats, sadistic seraph says, if they release this game, Bungy will get closed. Killing in C says, I don't have confidence in Bungi existing in its current state. They'll become a PlayStation Studios company.

I could honestly see Marathon getting canceled. Interesting, of course, there's still so much happening while we're live. Paul Tassie has tweeted after he put up the news. Most of Bungi found out about the marathon delay right now, indicating that this tweet is actually what, because he quote tweeted the initial tweet, indicating that that's what's going on and how Bungi as a studio is being informed

that your game is officially delayed. I have a section here that this is all on the heels of four fucking days ago we go to Paul Tassie at Forbes. Sony tout's strong marathon engagement confirms release window. The future of Marathon over the last month or so feels rather unsteady, but in a new SIE presentation, Sony is reinforcing that it's an important game in its lineup and projecting confidence. Sony's Herman Hulse took some time during his overview of PlayStation's offerings to single marathon out as, Quote, an innovative and bold take on the extraction shooter genre, end quote. This was joined by a slide that under the banner, fiscal, I'm sorry, yeah, fiscal year 25 focus,

which said that there is, quote, strong early engagement for bungee's bold new innovative, bungee's bold and innovative new title, end quote. For starters, we're back to Paul, of course. At least the presentation reinforces a window of marathon fiscal year 2025 in a time that most players believe it will be delayed out of its current September 23, 25 release date. Fiscal year 25 ends March 26. So it would not be something huge like a year delay. Even six months is pushing it.

So if there is one, it would not be all that long. And you would wonder what might be able to be changed or fixed in that time. This leads to the next aspect of this. This supposed, quote, strong engagement, end quote. Sure, there's been strong engagement, but that consists of a lot of negativity about the game's reveal, then in overwhelming sense that the closed alpha was underwhelming, then an industry-wide scandal where it all revealed, where it was revealed that plagiarized art had made it through the game's pipeline over a number of years and had ended up in the game

itself. So yes, there was, quote unquote, engagement. Either Sony is completely divorced from the online conversation surrounding Marathon, or they see where things are headed and feel forced to project strength regardless. Saying nothing about Marathon or waffling on it here would do nothing to help them or the game. So of course, yes, you say you believe in the game, even if you're dancing around what's actually happening by bragging about engagement. But internally, even Bungee is extremely concerned about where things are and where things are going from here. The chart of Sony's live service prospects is bleak. There's no real getting around that. It considers its external baseball game, the show, a live service.

Destiny 2 has been bleeding players and is now entering a very risky new era that seems unlikely to return the game to its glory days. Marathon is on the edge of oblivion at this point. It's hilarious they're even saying fair games is actually still coming out. The unequivocal bright spot here is Hell Divers 2, which has been true since it launched, but its developer, Arrowhead, will not be working with Sony for its next game. Over the course of the past two months, I've arrived at the conclusion that Marathon is just not going to work. The vibes are awful. The problems with the game are mostly etched in stone, and now we have an arts theft scandal on top of that.

I do expect the delay to be announced, but it won't be lengthy. And I do not believe this is going to release to be a... release that both Sony and Bungee need whatever they're saying in their slideshow. I echo all of that, right? And again, I come back to the idea of like, will they actually release this? I think you ate

so much shit with Concord. Where, like, it was out, what, two weeks? When do you pull up stakes here and go, all right, the art thing and this thing and that thing and it's just this isn't worth it again, Mike? Let me tell you what you do. Let me tell you, my brother. You release in March and guess what? GTA releases

in May. We just go out with a whimper. The gamers will forget about it. They will move on from your game, and we can just slowly kill that by the end of summer into the next year. I think if you have to release this, that's the play that they will do. They will look at February or March. They will drop this. Me and Andy have played hundreds of these multiplayer games that come on to Steam.

They are there for about two weeks to a month, and then you never talk about them in six months from now. And so a bungee title, of course, is much bigger than that. But if you wanted to do this, like quietly without doing, the Concord path of we're killing this in front of the public and everybody. You put this out in March. You let that ride for two months. The players will slowly

get quiet and then boom. GTA will come over. Nobody will speak about this game again and it will be like as if nothing ever happens. So that all happens then what happens to Bungee? Bungee has one goal. They should have stuck with the TLC routes. Don't go chase some waterfalls. Stick to the lakes and the rivers

that you used to. I've said this many of times. Okay. Well said. Destiny two. No one's acknowledging that was A lot of people, a lot of people come after me and Paul Tassie says it well. It's like, Destiny 2 has had its time in the sun and is slowly ramping down. You can be a hardcore Destiny fan and say, Mike, it's still great. There's still content being made, but it will never be what it was, right? We are at the trail end of Destiny.

It is time for that studio to focus up and just make a Destiny 3. And unfortunately, that's where they're at. Destiny is a mega hit. It's an awesome MMO that people love. It's a name and a brand that people will find. flock to, your studio now becomes the Destiny Studio for the next 10 years. You are focused on Destiny. The people who want to exist or Destiny 3?

You will make Destiny 3. You will start to slowly make a little more Destiny 2 content into Destiny 3. That's how it should have gone. That's how it was supposed to be. And so now, similar to Halo Studios, you will look at that staff and say, you either love and breathe Destiny or you're going to find a new place to go work. But there are hundreds of people that will come and say, I want to be part of destiny. I want to make destiny awesome for the future. And that's what they should have been doing

from this time. But we've talked about it many of times. A lot of CEOs, a lot of execs saw the trend of battle royals, saw Fortnite and said, there's money. We want more of that. Let's start chasing trends. And then there was this big rise up of people going, battle royale, there's battle royale that I don't want battle royals anymore. There's too many. And now people are saying, well, what else could we give them? Oh, extraction shooters. And now all of a sudden, we've seen everybody and their mother say, we want to make an extraction shooter without probably knowing the extraction shooter audience is tiny. And the idea of you making the one mainstay extraction shooter game is going to be like finding a needle in a haystack.

Good luck with that. And they all chase this. And they said, Sony probably told Bungee or Bunchy said that. And it was like, you should have just stuck to where you should have been. And that was making destiny content and getting into Destiny 3. I love the idea of destiny being so big or getting off the purchase, being able to make a

second project, try something different, but the extraction shooter wasn't it. And we all know that. 100%. Yeah, a lot of it is execs kind of seeing, you know, the battle or the battle royale genre, we're not going to be able to penetrate this genre, but we see a lot of opportunity here.

And we see a lot of opportunity here. And extractive shooter happens to be, well, Tarkov is killing it. We can be the, like we saw a lot of people in the, chat and a lot of people in comment saying, well, they can be the fortnight of an extraction show. That's just that that's not a thing, man. Like it's, you can't bet on that.

Yeah, it really isn't. And the issue is as well as we talk about what can be marathon. What can you change that to, right? We have so little time if we're going to hit that by March. You can't just change the foundation of this game. It will always kind of be built on this extraction shooter. So we're not getting a solo campaign out of this. We're not getting different game modes.

And already, you can't go. to a team arena shooter because we already have a thousand of those, right? This hasn't broken out to be, oh, it's incredible. And so my issue is, this is a game that you can't really change from a type A game all the way to a type C game out of nowhere

in six months. And so that's why you probably, you should drop this in February. We all play it for a month. People who love it, we'll ride with it. The people who complain about it, guess what? In May, GTA will come. We'll never speak of this game again. We'll forget about it. I want to talk about this in

comparison to Suicide Squad. But first, I need to remind you that we are kind of funny each and every day. We're doing a bunch of live talk shows for your viewing pleasure on Twitch.tv.tv.com slash kind of funny games and YouTube.com slash kind of funny games later on podcast services around the globe. No matter where you get the show, we'd really appreciate it if you consider picking up a kind of funny membership. Of course, $10 a month, supports our 11-person independent team. It gets you all of our shows. That's more than 80 shares a month ad-free. And of course, you get a daily dose of me in a 15 to 20-minute podcast. We call Greg.

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It's too far gone. You can't change it. This reminds me of Suicide Squad. When Suicide Squad had that PlayStation Showcase or, you know, state of playing, we're all like, yeah, yeah, yeah. And we all watch them, like, oh, shit, this doesn't look good at all. and that was universally the feedback. Then they were like,

where to Lang? And it was like, well, what are you going to do? You really can't change. Like, this is done. The game's done. This is what it is going to be, right?

Andy, for somebody who played both of those games, is Marathon as far gone as suicide squad was? Or is it just the wrong genre or wrong time? Well, I mean, I think that they're both in similar spots where it's, hey, the company that we love is making the thing that I don't want to be a part of. Like, it'd be similar to,

holy shit, the new Rockstar game is coming out. Let's see this big reveal. It's a cozy life sim. I mean, that could be cool, but like, that's not what I want from Rockstar. You know, so they're in very similar situations. And I don't know if they have the name or the power to push past those blocks, you know, I just don't think that they have that. Interesting. Mike, do you agree?

Yeah, I agree with that. I think just on the flip side, I think this one speaks a little bit more to the, I mean, it's a different audience, right? Like, this one, I want to say speaks to more of the casual audience, just because the Fortnite is just running around. Like, first person shooters are so hot. So I think more people will jump onto this and give it a little more love and time than they did Suicide Squad.

But it will be the exact same thing as a suicide squad of this release. it will get a month of coverage. They will get a month of people buying it, people refunding it, people jumping in and out of it. And it's just going to kind of come and go. So, yeah, it's in the exact same spot. This is what I just feel like, I guess maybe I live and breathe first person shooters a lot more, that there's a higher chance of people playing this for a weekend and then never playing it again, as opposed to suicide squad that very much felt like, no, you know.

Correct me wrong. This is just a fact of it. 39-99 on marathon is what they were saying. saying they were charging? They haven't announced a price. It's a premium. It will not be full price, but they haven't announced the price. But that's where we're right now.

Yeah. Yeah, it's, you know, you guys talking about Suicide Squad, I think, is obviously very apt conversation in terms of, hey, there's this beloved studio. They're doing something that we are not interested in. The other thing to talk about is, you know, Concord, where it came out. That's a different situation. That there was, it's kind of an unknown quantity with that team. And it was more just like that was our first taste of what that could be. And all of us still looked at out.

Like, I just don't know about this. And one of the bigger conversations around Concord and it failing was the, I think, very poor way they rolled out marketing for that game. And in addition to the state of play and them overhyping weird things that we just knew we couldn't believe in, like, the weekly story bits and all that stuff. Yeah. Yeah. It raises more questions and more like, I don't believe you vibes than anything else. But in addition to that, we all said they should have had a preview event. We look at Apex Legend, a game that didn't exist to the public.

And then all of a sudden, the first time it's being talked about it's, yo, we played it. It's awesome. I know you might think we don't need another battle royale. This one's freaking good. And that energy got people like, you know what? Free to play. I'm interested in this.

Let's give it a shot. And then Apex for years did great, right? I feel like Concord didn't do that. And Marathon, they did the beta, but it didn't work. And I think that is almost the worst case scenario, where it's like, all right, cool. So now it's been in the community's hands. It's not even just games media.

It is like games media and community. And the walkaway is, eh, it was okay. Some people liked it. Some people didn't. Some people's favorite thing was the art design and the art design was stolen. There's just a lot of elements there. I do think that the plagiarism and the art stuff, like, I don't think that's the reason for the delay. I think that people have been talking about like maybe it's like, oh, they're taking time to like, no, I don't think so.

I think that that is such a non-factor to them. They're going to deal with it however they need to of like the exact things that are legit stolen. They'll get taken away. The more, oh, it's like their designs and like their style. That's not going to change. You know, I think people are going to, money will be exchanged. And I think that'll be taken care of it.

But I don't think that has anything to do with it. To go back to your Apex example in, in this alpha and Concord at all this jazz, I think that's the big thing. When Apex showed up and caught everybody off guard and had the stuff. Marathon showed up and does not have this stuff. For me, it was when you guys did the Marathon Alpha, then you played Arc Raiders or vice versa. And then it was, you guys were like,

oh, let's play more Marathon. Nick was like, but I really want to play more Arc Raider. You know what I mean? Like, you went toe to toe with somebody and got clowned out of like, oh, this is the better thing. And in a world, we're constantly talking about how little time everybody has, how little money everybody has. Like, if you're going to come up and show up

and can't beat your first competitor. And add on to that, I think another thing we have to bring up is Concord, Hero Shooter, coming out, PlayStation console exclusive. And then guess what's coming out at the same time, Andy? Marvel Rivals. Here's this game that you can play anywhere that is free to play. That is Marvel. No IP.

You hear all the stuff, and not all of it. You hear the Marvel part, and that might be the most questionable thing. Well, turns out when you put the passion and care into it, it can work. And it's to this day working for them. But that was just another thing against, oh, shit, man. players played that game and we're like this is awesome we all saw that trailer this is one of the rare kind of funny moments that

we got to see a trailer for a game that we knew nothing about before everybody and we see this trailer and all of us were like that looks when net ease popped up we're all like hmm mobile game and then by the end of it we're like wait a minute this could have the stuff and then people played it

had the stuff like that's you need that story and for a marathon to not only have not that story but the story that it has died, I think, is a place you can't come back from. So I want to ask you guys, gameplay, let's say that they tweak things here and there to make it a little bit better

for more people getting in and that you're not getting clowned out. And like it, you're feeling good about playing it because you liked the gameplay, right, Andy? Oh, I mean, it's a bungee shooter. It feels good. And but the, the it's the whole genre itself, right? Like, you could

make a horror, gore movie a bit funnier, but it's still a horror gore movie that like if that's not your jazz you're not going to be into that um and i don't think that there's any tweaks you can do here this isn't a this isn't a multiplayer game with balancing issues yeah where you push some numbers up this way and make that tank stronger or whatever for me it's like the what you have here is the destiny and bungee fan base that are going to be sort of the main people that are going to be excited about the next destiny

bungee or bungee project. And so much about destiny is player agency. It's that's my guardian. That I, that's my dude. I customizing the way I want. I have my shaders the way. I'm using that armor instead of this one because I love the way that one looks and it's so much about that representation.

That's my dude. And to come out with an extraction shooter that is not the genre you necessarily want, but maybe I can customize my guy. Oh, it's just like I'm playing as it's a hero extraction shooter, which is even worse of a thing that you would want because you're pushing away your fan base even more because if I want to play a character class with those abilities, I have to be that character.

I don't want to be that character. And in the trailer or in that eight-minute sort of short that was done by the Love Death and Robots director, we're seeing, you know, this shell, this like sentient, like being or whatever. customizing themselves with a, and obviously the game would have skins. The game would have things like that, but it's like you are having to play as glitch, that girl with the spiky hair or as that guy who's always got the hood on or whatever.

It's like you're taking away that player agency, which is another thing that your audience was probably going to want in a game like this. I just think on top of that, Andy, the audience just doesn't want the PVP nature of this. We see so much of the casual audience. now moving away of like, I just want a PVE experience. I think that is why Hell Divers did so well, is you take the stress of Mike and his goons are going to come after you every waking moment and it's going to make a bad experience.

Now you have the chill of like, I'm relaxed. And Destiny is built off of that of like, I choose when to go into PVP. I don't have to be in this at all times. And when you play an extraction shoot, you make this kind of game, it is you are on your toes at all times and you're going to have a bad time if we come after you and we choose do, and that's what this game mode is going to be.

Every time we see you, we will attack you. And for other people, it's like, oh, man, I want to just jump into this. I'm a casual. Yeah. Greg Miller, I've never played an extraction shooter. His first 20 experiences should never see another player, because if he does, he's going to get run over to the point where it's like, well, he didn't extract any items. He didn't learn about the game mechanics. He has no idea what's happening.

Boom. The PVEPVP genre is like, you're making that bubble and you're taking it even smaller. And I think for an audience like Sony in particular, bungee with what they've built off of Destiny, they're not looking for a diehard PVP experience right now. So with that, right, we need community for this game. We talk about all the time with fighting games that are starting to thrive in a whole new way like we've never seen

because they're being supported by the developers in various forms, whether it's releases, quality releases, updates to those releases, fighting game tournaments and community opportunities, like cross-platform play for a lot of these things. Like a lot of efforts being put in. into that. When we started talking about these subgenres and subgenres of subgenres and then diagrams of everything of shooting games and the multiplayer modern experience, like, do you think that this being cross platform, is there a way that they can change the paid

$40, whatever this ends up being and just make it free to play that makes this work well enough? Is that even possible? A lot of these games in this genre are not free to play. So a lot of them are on the budget titles, but still premium settling at that. $30 to $40 range. So it's like you're in the market. That is where everybody is. Being free to play, I don't think tips of scales any more in this,

simply because you now know what you're getting into. Yes, you might try it and maybe they'll get a million more players when they can, you know, my favorite game pass. Hey, we got 30 million here. It's like, okay, well, a lot of people just click that to try it for a weekend. That's what you'll see there.

They'll promote two million people played it, but really only a million really want to stick in this. And so I don't think going free to play will change the route of what this is going to In the same way that it wouldn't have helped Concord. Yeah. That we knew what Concord was. I still think it was a very good game that just came out around a time that everything is better

and people are invested much more in those ecosystems. And Free to Play will not a hell of Concord. And I don't think Free to Play will drastically change this as well, either because it's like the recipe is still what it is. God, they're so fucked. It is. Can I inject one super chat to this conversation? because it's right where we're at.

It's piggybacking off of something Tim said, right? This is Street Shadow, who's super chat. It said, Tim, I will say the alpha did work because they're delaying the game based on the feedback. Alphas are not only for hyping the game. Alpha proved the game needed more time. Concord didn't do that. Here's what I would disagree with on this,

is that to what we're talking about, when, and I really believe it's an if you ever see Marathon again, it's not going to be radically changed. It's still going to be an extraction shift. shooter and that's that that's the core problem we're talking about is that it's a of a genre people don't necessarily want or that they're going to make an impact in this strikes me as the suicide squad state of play where it's like we put it out there and oh fuck you're all giving us feedback we knew internally or maybe you i mean bungee must have known PlayStation was like this does feel

very in the way like oh get into the beta that's two weeks before launch well that's fucking that's not a beta that's a demo right this feels very similar to a degree of like That's you stress testing servers. We're putting out the date and we're putting out this alpha in quotes, which again, for alpha, you'd be further along than that. But we're putting it out to see what the market in the world thinks of it. And I think Concord didn't do that because they would have gotten similar feedback, I assume, right? And now they've gotten this feedback and it's like, okay, well, you know what I mean with the Concord example.

But like now we're to the point of like, I don't think this is all right. We're taking you offline and back to the drawing board here to work on you as much as it is to Hemhaaw, lay off a bunch of people and kill it. I mean, we've talked about Concord a lot, but like Concord also had a different beast. It was going into a dying genre, which is the team arena shooter that we just don't see a lot of love in right now. It's like that is a beloved style of gameplay when you think of halos, old school call of duties. We've seen Splitgate kind of break the mold with this, but like team arenas are not the hot stuff that it is right now that people think. It is battle royals.

It is hero. shooters like Overwatch and Marvel rivals. Concord shows a route that like that was not the right move. Remember, X Defiant came out. Yeah, another one of those team arena shooters. That's like, that's not where the audience is right now. And it's very tough to start a game five years before, like right now, and say, where is this audience going to be five years from now?

It's just an ever-evolving market. But when you think of trends and you think of old-school staples, some of those old-school staples aren't as strong as they used to be. It's really interesting that it does seem like we can all call this. Like, why is it that we can look at all these games and know, oh, X-Dify it? We put that in a category. But we looked at Marvel rivals and we put that in a different category. Like, is it sheer quality of game?

What's the X factor there? I think the one thing in this conversation that we got wrong and I don't want to put everyone in that thing was Hell Divers too, which would break out success that I don't think any of us could have at all put in the category. I mean, I don't think anyone could have predicted. Exactly. as a Helldiverston. But like, do you remember all the, we, where's PVP at for Helldiver's 2?

Do you remember how that lasted for about three weeks? And people were like, oh, is it, is it done? Because they don't have PVP. Is this game going to fail? It's like, no, people want this experience. Arrowhead was very clear of, hey, no, that's not the game we make. I'll go on the opposite side from Tinder, we're like, I don't think I could have called Marvel rivals.

I can look at a lot of these games and say, you know, I keep on making the comparison. and it's Charles Barkley in the era of Michael Jordan. It's like I look at Marvel rivals, and I could have easily seen that failing, along with all of the other very, very good high-quality games. Maybe the IP certainly gives it a big boost, but there's a lot of awesome quality games

that if they were released 10 years ago, 8 years ago, it would be a completely different story. But because they were releasing right now, it's just you are surrounded by all this stuff, and it's so hard to even make an impact. Thousands of games a year, thousands of games a month are getting dropped here. Yeah, to be clear, I'm not saying that we could have predicted Marvel rivals would have been the success it is. That's way beyond what I'm saying.

Okay. But I do think there's something about that initial reveal that we saw and the excitement there. And then when you guys played it, the energy y'all had. The fact that y'all wanted to go home and keep playing it together. For real stuff. All it took was seeing the game and then playing the game. And then all of a sudden it's like, oh, yeah. Whereas like a lot of these other ones, you see, you play, you're like, uh-uh.

And it's like there's a lot of factors that go into it. But it is something where we look at Marathon and it's not in the Marvel rivals category, definitively. Well, Marvel rivals is also scratching an itch that needed to be scratched that was different than a lot of these, right? Overwatch has had its time in the sun. Overwatch 2 was disastrous on how they launched that and really brought that back up. And people love Overwatch. They want that kind of hero-based team. objective style gameplay.

And Marvel rivals, you mix Marvel, the hype that we've rode for these past 10 years with the MCU, plus the game is good. Now you're putting it in this kind of market that is Overwatch and fans like Andy who loves that style of gameplay, the old e-sports fans of Marvel of Overwatch, they needed something and that's what Marvel rivals hit, right? Marathon, of course, Concord,

they're all going for a different market. They are a different style of game. Marvel rivals and Overwatch have their own style. and that's what people were looking for at that time. You guys correct me on this. Concord. Would you put that closer to a Halo or closer to a Overwatch? Halo.

A halo. 100%. Yeah, yeah. It is a team arena. It's like heroes, but it's team arena. It's still a hero shooter, but it was largely kill confirmed or, you know, I would say Marvel rivals and Overwatch

were, are pretty much they're just the same game with replaced characters and even moves that are all very, very similar. Yeah, like you're pushing a payload. You're scratching that sort of same itch that you've been looking to get scratched. Mike, does any conversation here change

if this is not marathon? This is destiny extraction. No, you're going into a market that is not welcoming, very welcoming to casuals. You are dropping a game. Even if this was destiny extraction shooter, you would still have the audience going, ooh, you're not as good as you need to be, right?

Our creators proved that, like, there is a small market for this, that people will get excited for and kind of drop what they're doing and play for a weekend to a week, maybe more we'll see on October 30th, how long that our graders love really last. I'm still very hesitant on that. I think it's going to get some good love,

but I don't think we'll be talking about that in 2026, two months afterwards, right? And so you're going into a market that it's like, this is already very hard to crack. This game wasn't that good, right? The gun play was good. It was shallow. It was missing things.

The maps were too similar. the NPCs that we were fighting were way too similar. There wasn't much variety going on in that. And I think when you expect something out of Destiny and Bungee, you expected something more. Yeah, there's, I mean, I could easily look at Arc Raiders to say, yeah, if it fails, I won't be surprised at all. I do feel like there is a different sort of fervor around Arc graders

from the, from the PC community who's maybe already played Tarkov and experienced that. but there seems to be a different level of enthusiasm and excitement for our creators where the leaks and the hopeful people that were thinking that it was going to be shadow dropped on summer game fest like that was gaining a lot of traction within that community. I don't know how big that community is granted. There was one though. Yeah. And I think I think the when you're talking about the enthusiasm levels,

it is night and day between what people were looking at and feeling about marathon compared to how the same people who should be. interested are feeling about arc graders because they seem a lot higher on that. And I enjoy the hell out of art graders. And at the end of the day, I'm like, ah, this was also supposed to be a division like, you know, shared world shooter co-op thing

that I would have enjoyed probably way more. Yeah, two super chats before I want to end down an article here. Deja Q super chat and says, I can't see this delay not having layoffs, follow it. Leadership needs to change for Bungi to survive. They rarely have delays that didn't have layoffs to follow. Would a full Sony acquisition save them?

I also think like this one down here, that was also calling into leadership from Kazawi. The executive seemed to be the issue at Bungies. They ship mid, fix after feedback, and repeat. Look at D1 slash D2 launch versus expansions, let alone just what we've heard out of Bungy for so long of leadership, the changes over there, what's going on. I think, again, it's interesting to look at that

and then talk about why Arrowhead didn't add PVP to Helldivers, right? where they came out and they were so clear, so firm, this is the game we are making. We're not going to do that. We're not making a game by committee or by our community. We're making a game that'll follow the community. It's long gone, and I forget, I couldn't do it, but it went through quick.

Somebody put in there, great games don't chase markets, they make them. And I think that's an interesting way, and I'm paraphrasing even what that was of an interesting right. And I think, again, where we look at PlayStation's problems in this live service is them trying to look ahead and jumping on something. not understanding where they're going. I want to go to the WYP at IGN.

That's Wesley Yin Poole, who had this article a while back. Sony Live Service woes continue as PlayStation executive Jade Raymond exits Fair Games developer after external test sparked concern. Jade Raymond has left Haven Studios, the Sony-owned developer, behind online multiplayer shooter Fair Games, with the game reportedly delayed following an external test and yet another blow to PlayStation's live service ambition. According to Bloomberg, Raymond exited the company. she founded several weeks after an external test of fair games apparently didn't go down well.

The game was due out in fall 2025, but is now delayed to spring 2026. As Bloomberg put it, PlayStation leadership didn't give Haven staff a reason for her departure, but it came several weeks after an external test of Haven's first game, the online shooter fair games, according to people with knowledge on the matter. Some developers at Haven were concerned about how the game was received and its progress, said the people who asked not to be identified because they aren't authorized to speak publicly. It's yet more trouble for Sony's embattled live service ambition,

which now appears to be in full retreat. While Arrowheads, Helldivers 2, is a breakout hit, becoming the fastest selling PlayStation Studios game of all time, with 12 million copies sold in just 12 weeks. Sony's other live service games were either canceled or suffered disastrous launches. Indeed, Sony's Concord is one of the biggest video game disasters in PlayStation history, lasting just a couple of weeks before it was brought offline amid eye-wateringly, low player numbers.

Sony later decided to kill the game entirely and shut down its developer. The Concord flop came after Sony already canceled Naughty Dogs the last of us multiplayer game. In earlier this year, Sony reportedly canceled two unannounced live service games. One, a god of war title in development at Blue Point, the other in works at Days Gone developer Bend. Man, it's the publishing of this. It's like none of these people talk to each other.

Man. Like, it's as if that they have the. studies that are like, well, we have, we have like, you know, a lot of people doing research and in about the next five years, we're going to have double the amount of gamers on the planet. But don't tell my kids. That's insane. Holy shit. Yeah, I want to take that too, because, like, the talking to each other and even the, just

kind of, like, cross teams at PlayStation Studios and how all this stuff works, it's like, you think back to 2015, 16, when Kujima went on his little tour, right? And then... He was searching for a new technology. And we get the Horizon engine, the Decima. The Decima engine, right? And cool, we're going to link up that way. And death stranding is going to be made.

And here we are now on the eve, essentially, of Death Stranding 2. Death Stranding 1 sold, I think, way better than anyone would have expected that project, too, for the time being exclusive on PlayStation and it being as weird as it was. And to pull over real quick, too, remember just a smaller footprint, a smaller developer, a smaller cycle, smaller spin. All of that, all of that, right? But a success. And here we are, Death Stranding 2, probably good.

going to be a major success, eventually going to other consoles and stuff, bringing in a super chat from Guitar Hero Arrow from the first whispers of Marathon back in 2014. I hope this would be the heartfelt single player reboot we eventually got from Doom and Wolfenstein. Can you imagine if Bungee had made a Wolfenstein or Doom scaled marathon single player reboot that they could, because of the way they were acquired and were like, we want autonomy, also put on PC, PlayStation, and Xbox day one. That is a recipe. for success, but that we have seen proven that, oh, people will buy these games to the extent they need to.

We can have a smaller team work on this. Like, the expectations are different, and that is serving an audience that wants that. And on top of that, Destiny feeds the money bank, right? Like, you keep Destiny content going, you keep moving with Destiny. We can have these one-off single-player experiences that we know. They make money, but they're not making the live service money. And now you can have both. You can have your cake and eat it too, right?

Hey, here's Destiny. That's my moneymaker. Hey, here's a really cool Wolfenstein and Doom reboot that no one would ever think it's going to be played for a year and then come and go and we'll make another one in five.

You know, that's all you had to do. And it's wild thinking that about a year ago was when they laid off 220 employees. And then two months prior to that or a month prior to that, they laid off 100.

So it's like, damn, like over 300 people being laid off from Bungee. That's pretty fucking massive. Uh-huh. And they're pre-level. layoff numbers were 1,300 employees, and now they're down to a measly 850. Like, there's so many people.

And surely, when we look at, I know you can't just like compare apples to oranges, but when we look at, um, um, um, um, um, I'm, um, um, I'm, um, um, uh, obsidian. Or, or, or, you know, some of these teams that have these smaller teams break off off and do these smaller projects, you know, that, that is possible. You don't need 815,000. people working on some and clearly some of those people were being moved to the marathon project or you know these people are kind of like floating between two different divisions or whatever but

it's just so wild to me that that there are not only that many employees at bungee that continue to you know seemingly get laid off but to think of the possibility of holy shit we could have had a smaller team 100 or 200 people working on a single player thing that does not need to, does it need to be the forever game. If we sold two to three to four million copies of this thing at 50, 60, 70, whatever it is, and it's like, 40. Incredibly high quality. Like, oh my gosh, that just sounds like such a dream situation. And it, it just really shows you executives are going to be chasing the dollar signs. We had to chase the dollar

signs. We needed a Fortnite. We needed an online success. We needed that. People only have so much time. Of course, I'm in an interesting phase of like, I'm not mad at the vision and the idea, right? Like, coming from the Xbox side of things, you see live service games that are doing well, right? But there's a certain kind

of style to that live service game. There's also years of like, you remember see a thieves at launch? Guess what? We're like seven years in the sea of thieves. ESO at the beginning of ESO, right? Fallout 76. They have a number of I mean, the fact that you're getting a grounded too. Yep.

And so like, I like the idea that PlayStation was like, hey, we've nailed what the general audience wants, that single player narrative driven third person action adventure game. We got that. Okay, what can we do over here? And I think they just missed the mark of what their audience wanted. And it speaks with hell divers. Hell divers is a PVEE experience. There is no Timmy and Tommy's hunting you down.

Hell divers, I've believed since the beginning, would not have. have been as big as it is if it was PVP or had a PVP element, right? Because then you would not have the experiences of sharing moments with your friends. We look at all these live service games that have gone down that Greg just read off. That is not fitting the mold of what PlayStation gamers wanted. Somehow you went from my PlayStation gamers want single player action adventure narrative driven games. Okay, let's give them live service games.

Maybe we don't make hardcore PVP first person shooter titles. Let's try to build off of what Xbox did with Sea of Thieves, what Xbox did with ESO. We also have to remember that some of these titles take years to really find an audience and stay relevant. And it's not cash cow day one. If See at These releases today, it doesn't last. But to that point, too, and I love that you're bringing this up because, like, we should remember that seven years ago or whatever it was, when Rare announced Sea of Thieves, we were like, this isn't what we want from Rare. you know like even that was a thing of this same conversation applied back then they turned it around but what were the factors that got it there like how much did the very low barrier of entry of things

like game passing allowing that game to have that community multi-platform support all of that over time there's a PlayStation plus i am giving you 12 to $20 a month there's no reason why some of these titles aren't doing that right and PlayStation it seems to be adverse to some of this i don't get the vibe of PlayStation like a game passive like hey here's my my, here's a great one for you. Ninja Theory made a game called Bleeding Edge, which just died right away. That was a team

arena game. God damn. And Ninja Theory made that. And guess what they did? Put it on game pass. And it lived a lot longer than Concord and this game over here with Marathon. Just follow what's working. Look around you and communicate like you all said. I don't know how we're missing the mark.

It's crazy. I edged for about a week, man. Until you bled. Christ. You're out there. I'm just blown away that when we talk Sony Live service, you, yes, there's a market for this, and this is the right move, because guess what? My portfolio over

here is already fucking crushing it. It is eating Nintendo and Xbox's fucking for lunch, right? They're doing it. But I needed more. I needed that Fortnite money maker and you did the right move, getting bungee. You can explain to me if it's not a full purchase, but like having bungee in the lineup

and saying like, hey, let's make more destiny. That's the golden goose. You do that. But everything else, look at what your market wants. Hell Divers was a success because it was a PVEE. Make that, but in Sony worlds. We don't need everything to be PVP. The audience doesn't want that.

It's not even the PVP aspect. It's the you need to live here. You need to be engrossed in this ecosystem. Like I, it's crazy you listing off that massive amount of games that are all trying to do the same thing, which is

retain a player for as long as possible. And it really just feels like when the person of the top hears about all of these studios going like, I just kind of like offhandedly mentioned a couple of y'all should be doing this. Not every one

of you, dude. What the fuck, man? That's like, that's so... Casual conversation at a happy hour. Yeah. And everyone ran back to their studio. It was like, we need to make a lot of... And it's unfortunately, it feels like it's even the opposite of that. It's them being like, I know you're all doing it. Do it. You know?

Yeah. It's not the like, oh, whoa, whoa, I didn't mean all of you. It feels like they did mean all of them. Like, this is on them as much as it's on anybody. And it's not more on. It also felt like we snapped our fingers. We got four or five studios and they all started working at the exact same time. And now we're seeing that work being turned into the teacher.

And we're all like, oh shit. Like nobody wanted any. Walsh. You know. There was no like, hey, you're up first and then slowly go to you. It's all on you. It's just like, here's five. And we're all ready to rock.

And it's like, oh, shit. that was too fast here. Street Shadow gets the final super chat of the show and says the most successful live service Sony games have not been marketed as such. MLB the show, Hell Divers 2, Grantismo 7. It's partially a marketing thing. Outwriters. It's a big game like Outriders, man.

I mean, I don't think it's a market thing as well. If you know a sports title, it's a live service game, you know that. When they did that thing where they did a whole fucking state of player showcase, right, where it was like, oh, it's all live service. I don't want this ship. But here we are. Now the question is, is Bungy doomed? Yes.

To end this show. Greg Miller is Bungy doomed. Yes. It's not Bungy as doomed as, hey, we closed Bungy. I do think it's Bungy as doomed as they are laying off an additional 65% of their workforce while they focus on supporting PlayStation efforts and work on their own idea, which will never come to fruition. It will become this.

You do not play a marathon, I don't think. What about the frog game? What about the frog game? A lot of people look for that one. What frog game? frog type game. They're working on a frog type game. Well, a team from Blungie Bungie split off to do

to do LFG. Okay. And they're, you know, frog type games. I mean, a Battle Royal Frogger game, I mean. Yeah. Frogger 99. Boom, put it out. They're joking. Like, everything he says is true. They're making a frog type game. A frog type game.

We don't know what that means, but they, like, I've been high on the couch once before making up shit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, you're good. There was a team. There was a team at bungee making shit. And everybody was like, man, that team, was really cooking something and they broke off and got their own logo. Greg, I'm right there with you with everything you said about the level of

doom that Bungie is. My big thing is that I don't believe in is that we don't, that Burython doesn't get released. Like that's the thing to me that I'm like oh man, but I would have never thought they would have done what they did to Concord. I just don't know. Was like such egg on their face and such a learning experience that they have to sit there and go, it'll be better just to eat crow. It didn't come together. We read the feedback. It's a crowded market. We're sorry then. and put it out and have another.

Yeah, this is, like, five people will understand this, but Mike, this is the Phoenix Suns going all in on on Bradley Bill and Kevin Durant. Yeah, uh-huh. And mortgaging their future. Yes. And that team was a disaster. Where are we at?

Yeah, yeah. And now you are going to, and it's not just like that team was a disaster. Let's just be ready to go next year. No, like, those teams were working for so long on these things, and now that they are going to be gone. then you are going to see the fallout of this. It's like similar to us when we would talk about the pandemic developed games.

This fallout is going to continue for the next several years of all of these failed studios with all of this lost, I would say, confidence from employees being like, why would we want to go work over there? We've seen how badly mismanaged all of this shit is. Like all of that stuff has consequences. And we are going to see the fallout of all of these failures for the, the next five years because that's how long it takes to make these

big ass games now. We'll see a video like Halo Studios come out of like, we're Bungy and we make Destiny and we fucking love Destiny and you're like, all right, stick to it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. Well, ladies gentlemen and NBs, we'll be watching whatever happens to Marathon

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