Can anyone prove that Bungie is actually losing money besides them doing layoffs that every AAA company is doing right now? I heard this shit about Destiny for ten years and yet they're still here.
You can just do the napkin math.
Marathon started development in 2019 and according to Bungie, half the team was Marathon. They had (up until recently, lol) a studio that had 1,000 employees, so, 500 full time employees for seven years. We're going to make a few assumptions.
The average developer employee makes $100,000 a year. It's probably a touch more but for napkin math it's fine. Where the studio is located (Bellvue, WA) the median salary is ~$115,000.
Just in salary, the game cost $50,000,000 a year and was in dev for 7 years - meaning $350,000,000 right in the door. This also not the entire cost as there's tools, licensing, marketing (there was a whole ARG for this), servers/infrastructure, and so on.
Steamcharts has Steam's all time peak at 70,000 players. Let's be generous and assume that not every person showed up at the same time and say they sold 200k on Steam, 200k on PSN, and 100k on XBX (I don't think it's even this high) - at $40 a copy (which, again, they don't even get to keep as Steam/Sony/XBX take a 30% cut before any other fees) that would be $20,000,000 - which is no where near the $350,000,000 they would need to even begin to break even.
Even if you think my numbers are too low and suggested "Tanner, let's say they moved 2.5 million units!" (1000% of my projection) - that still only would put them at $100,000,000 (again, before the 30% cut and fees and such, which are substantial). They also did not move 2.5 million units because...
The "free weekend/week/trial" captured no one and didn't even break 45,000 users on Steam - so let's assume the game has ~40,000 users as it's current audience.
The game has MTX, but to even break even (not to mention still carrying all the other costs) but they would need every single of their 40,000 users to spend $6,200
each. They are not making $6,200 per user (the average for free games is $87 per user, as a reference point) and this game isn't free. They have no plans or ability to capture new users and are already taking steps to prepare for a dead game (layoffs, forced map rotation, early discount, free weekend, etc). The only disagreement in this thread is if Marathon ever gets to a place where it's "technically" profitable (as in, generating a revenue but never getting to the money it cost to make) or if Sony just rips the plug out to stop losing money (aka Concord and Highguard).
Even being very generous with the math - Marathon sits at the bottom of a very deep money hole it cannot get out of. Destiny 2 struggled and it had a much larger audience and a much better sales than Marathon does - so it's extremely dire.
Marathon is "finished" (from a development standpoint, they shipped it) - but most of the layoffs were targeted for Destiny 2. If the studio is down to ~500 employees, even if it's 50/50 Marathon/Secret New Project - that's still $25,000,000 a year in Marathon Dev costs for every year it goes on. That's a major reason that most dying games quickly move to a skeleton crew of 1-10 devs instead of 250. It could also be more than 250 and Sony could simply be lying about the "Bungie's New Project" to save face, it could be much higher as well.
TL;DR - even being really nice about assumptions - the game lost $250,000,000 at launch (almost certainly much more) and will never make it back.
