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How the hell does this keep happening?
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- Published on Apr 18, 2026
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On this channel, you’ll find long-form video essays about gaming’s biggest stories from studio collapses and corporate greed to the creative risks that still push the medium forward. I break down industry trends, publisher decisions, and the economics behind how games are made, marketed, and sold.
Whether it’s GTA 6, Elden Ring, Baldur's Gate 3, Path of Exile 2, Call of Duty, Battlefield, Pokémon, or the next doomed live-service experiment, I cover how the industry’s biggest names keep shaping and breaking the games we play.
From deep dive analysis on publishers like EA, Bungie, Blizzard, Activision, Ubisoft, Sony, and Microsoft to commentary on indie hits like Palworld and Expedition 33, every video cuts through the marketing to get to what actually matters: how this industry works, who it’s failing, and why players deserve better.
"You only like it cuz it's good!"
Isn’t that the main reason to like a game?
That's the joke, kid
How to explain this same thing in its reverse direction?! "I don't play a game, because I don't like it."
That gets immediately transformed into "You are hating on the game".
It’s just qualityslop
You only play it B/C everyone else is. You're all just so sad...
"It's literally Slay the Spire 1 but with more stuff"
YEAH, THAT'S WHY IT'S SO GOOD!
I picked up the first one on steam for about £2 around Christmas. Damn I never expected to be so hooked on a game like that.
I need sts2 on my phone already damnit
I could've played slay the spire until I wrong way'd, my lobster too buttery, my steak too juicy
With multiplayer too, they are so good man, the first game is a classic, in at the level of balatro imo
@juansotelo3996 yeah multiplayer caused most of my roguelike friends to get it
“Just another roguelike.” Okay…”just another extraction shooter.”
This!👆 Marathon (Bungie) fanboys just mad.
while roguelikes keep getting more and more popular the fact that a deck-building game wich is a more nich sub-genere outperformed maraton for so much its incredible, before baldurs gate 3 and expedition 33 I would have though this is imposible
@BARDI77i love the rogue genre. I’ve gotten so may hours of entertainment out of them and most don’t cost more than $15-$20
Mogged by "Just another roguelike".
@BARDI77 Imagine thinking deck builders are a niche sub genre
Turning 30 i've realized i'm not putting money into anything that doesn't respect my time
Then run from Bungie lmao
Turning 40. You knew here? 😂. I agree tho. I’ll buy dlc. But I’m
Not paying money to wear digital clothes or colors. I feel
Bad for the kids that never get to experience a game done and working on day 1
Exactly, I realized that at around 21, that's also when I quit Destiny 2 as a long time fan playing since D1, vaulting and sunsetting showed me they don't give a damn about my time nor my money, so why would I invest any more of it.
Same for all the other games, that had potential but companies shut them down without actually trying to improve.
@erikasl.7050destiny 1 I had soooo many hours sunk into, d2 i played the campaign once on launch and literally never touched my ps4 after that bad of an experience.
@NextGenOperators aye… paying extra to look cool has always been the way if you can’t earn it in game. However I ultimately agree if the game is booty butt cheeks and dinkle berries. To ask for more money from people in this economy knowing the product isn’t up to par is astronomically egregious
If SpongeBob taught me anything it's that an ocean of slop can never beat a Krabby Patty made with love.
if mr krabs has taught me anything, it's money.
Made with love he says and it's the next indie slop
Why does he keep ducking the live service game Pokopida that is sold out worldwide with wait times for download
@chiquita683not sure, why don't you ask him?
@CSRT123unfortunately, but it's true.
"How many times we have to teach you this lesson old man"
Too bad the old and stubborn at the top are too deaf to listen to words that don't involve the word *"money"*
It's not even an "old man" anymore...just a bunch of crooked narcissistic CEO with zero respect for players
@khiemnguyent as if those old farts respect their cash cow
I'm tired of competitive PVP FPS games
He's a gambler, 98% of gambling addicts quit before their winning streak into success and wealth.
"Just another rogue-like"
Currently, at 10:17 AM EST -5 ON A TUESDAY - 571000+ players. Work day. Early Morning.
Most game studios would sell their mother's soul to have those kinds of players.
China
@OtherworldJudge89Then where are chinese players for marathon?
Yeah but not a huge AAA made by bungie !!! They need WAY WAY WAY more than that !! They needed at least 500k opening weekend
@SlowlyChokingare you talking about marathon or sts2? Sts2 is still over 500k as of this moment
@SlowlyChoking yeah i just checked 32k unless he is talking about slay the spire but we all know its got huge numbers so i dont know why you would mention it
“They spent too much money, they wouldn’t abandon it”. Sony spent $400 million on Concord and that shit lasted less than 2 weeks so we know that’s not true lmao.
Developers forgot that the best live service game is a very good single-player game, because that is what will sell for the entirety of its existence. You can’t sell a game whose servers are shut down.
Yea look at Skyrim, every system, every year it seems to be released lol
@Tipsythomasthey release skyrims like its madden
I NEVER thought of it that way! And someone comes in with the absolute bomb of an analogy and says “yeah people keep buying Skyrim” you’re right! People have been buying good single player games decades after there out!!!! That is a good service
I am very excited to see what Bethesda is like without Todd Howard. I can dream.
@thetrashcanman7537 where's ES7?
It's simple, the CEO of McDonald's gave away the secret in that big arch video. Big companies aren't out there to make a "game" (or a "Burger"), they are out there to make a "product". Small indie devs want to make a game you will have fun with, big companies want to make a product you will buy.
This
Nail on the head broski
and the product is skins at whatever price they think they can get away with
And,now, most video game players aren’t out there to have a good time but to not have a miserable time.
i actually think it was a 4d chess move and now everyone is talking about it. he fooled you and its worse than you think. :P ;)
"Money can buy attention but not interest." That is the core of everything going on the gaming industry. You can promote all the shit you want, but you're never gonna succeed if you don't have an interesting game.
I agree I also think on top of that gamers that are older are jaded and want a game that respects their time and money and indie does that while AAA doesn't do that as much anymore
"If it's not fun, why bother?"
@DrDree001Exactly. But the main issue is most people don't give the attention to Indies, and Indies don't usually grab that attention unless everyone is talking about it.
@janky477 Indie games don't NEED that much though. There is a solo game dev who gave a GDC talk about how he basically makes a new variation of the same game, mostly adjusting lore, balance, and encounters (it's an RPG so quests, story, etc), and he reliably sells enough to earn about $150k yearly salary for himself for the last 20 years. Self published, sells a few thousand copies a year, and that's all he really needs to be, frankly, absolutely killing it. He has a small but loyal fanbase, and what he makes is exactly what they are looking for.
That's the big difference between a real Indie studio and AAA: STS probably made back their entire 10 year development budget in the first 100k copies sold. They've sold another 20x that. If they are smart about how they manage their money (and it seems like they are), then they're set as a studio for the next 50 years. THAT's the real strength of Indie over AAA. Marathon's numbers are going to be barely enough to keep the lights on for Bungie, they need another game that does AT LEAST Marathon's numbers in the next 3-5 years or they'll be in real trouble.
Idk I think marathon is super interesting, the universe is deep with lore and it’s a different take on extraction shooters through a hyper dystopian lens
It's funny how they always call the least profitable honest side of critics "grifters" but the people who just pretend to like everything and never speak their minds and lie to their audience so they can keep getting brand deals are somehow not grifters. They get the definition of everything completely backwards.
That's actually on purpose. It's a form of well-poisoning. The inversion of two disparate (often opposed) ideas is a form of manipulation to try to gaslight people into thinking through that lens of reversed definitions. To default to the line-of-thinking that only bought-and-paid-for "critics" in huge, corporate game journalism companies can be legitimate. It's an appeal to authority by demanding you ignore the evidence of your eyes and ears and kowtow to those that are more powerful than you, without question.
"That small, independent journalist that speaks his mind honestly and gives fair, unbiased criticism? Don't trust him. Trust us, the ones paid to lie to you. We have money and power. Therefore, you should listen only to us."
@Armameteusoy vey
@FS-AMVsstop noticing
Who’s they though
Liars gonna lie.
A friend of mine that stopped playing most games around 15+ years ago when he was diagnosed with MS. Imagine my surprise when steam notified me that he logged in to play Slay the Spire 2!!!
What's MS?
@QuickDeath02multiple sclerosis
@QuickDeath02 Microsoft (or microhard if you take the right pills)
As a fellow MS patient salute him for me 😊
Coop with him😂
Mega Crit somehow convincing Bungie to launch Marathon to act as an advertisement for STS2 was wild.
"It's even funnier the Xth time!"
I have lost count of how many times this has been, but I still love it.
I thought this was an StS joke and was gonna tell you to grab Chemical X 😢
Marathon had to have an aggressive marketing campaign when the studio is getting caught stealing intellectual property left and right
as a former destiny player
when they say “it’s going to get better later”
run
Run a marathon * 😜
AMEN….i was addicted to Destiny, then D2 released and killed that, I still played but nothing like I did and now I do t play at all because of the greedy monetization they forced into that game….free to play ruined D2, no game that starts out as a paid experience should go to free to play because it will just ruin the game!
run? well, it's a marathon, not a sprint
Preach!
It’s good right now. Who’s saying it’ll be better later.
800 people at bungie?!?! my brother in Christ if thats not the definition of too many chefs in the kitchen idk what is.
Suddenly the massive development cost of marathon is making sense to me now.
Dude there used to be 1200 at Bungie
are they counting the receptionist? and the accounting department? HR? or is that just 800 artists working on the actual game?
If Sony spit those 800 people into 10 teams of 80 maybe my ps5 would be more useful than my PS2.
800 DEI Hires at bungie we need more layoffs in the west. Steam, Eastern, indies devs are our last hope for gaming the western side of gaming is lost to wokeness
An indie game dunking on a "QuADruPLe A" game is something that gives me hope for real ones in the industry.
Male energy, mock your rivals if they are being that bad, it'll either get them to be better at something else or they'll genuinely improve.
Quintuple A games when?
@Saint_Wolf_ "Male Energy"
I mean they never said they were a quadruple a game
It’s only momentary hope, these same terrible AAA companies buy out indies and ruin them
But why do we compare them... it's so strange...
"What’s going on? Why don’t they like it? WE SPENT 250 MILLION DOLLARS ON THIS!!!"
thats only 0.625 concordillion dollars!
AND OVER 3 BILLION FOR THE STUDIO!!!!
Exactly that.
We spent 200 million on cheesy tv advertising, we paid the top streamers to play, we have CGI commercials that show ZERO GAMEPLAY !!
Why aren’t the gamers buying this
😂
And destroyed an already loved game in order to make this!
@EchoDoctrine what's funny is you probably couldn't coherently say why you actually don't like it but if everyone else is doing it, why not join in right? 🫡 steam numbers is probably the worst thing to come out in full as of recently. Paying top streamers is also just misinformation, if you don't want it to touch one of your favorite games in terms of competition just pay it no mind.
An interesting note about comparing an extraction shooter to a roguelike:
In an extraction shooter, doing well means you gain cool stuff and doing poorly means you lose cool stuff.
In a roguelike, it doesn't matter how well or poorly you do because you're going to lose your stuff.
A similar note about comparing a live service game to a local play game:
In a live service game, no matter how much you personally love it, if the playerbase isn't large enough, the game gets taken away from you.
In a local play game, no matter how many people care if the game exists, if you love it, it's yours forever.
It's not about the genre, it's about if you can own the game, apparently the people who made marathon just don't know the difference.
One of the reasons I’m never touching a paid live service game is that if I pay the sticker price and buy micro transactions in good faith, only for it to shut down in under a year, why would I ever play it?
Yeah I get that and I like Marathon but I don’t want to be treated like a Pay Piggy lol
Helldivers 2 and deep rock galactic are great and still live service.
Perhaps its a you issue?
@Cattildobud those are exceptions not the rule, such a bad faith argument
@ImJustTen League of legends, Cs2, and Dota 2 are all "live service" and yet millions play everyday. Bad, uninteresting, uninspired games are just that, regardless of something being live service or not. Arguing in bad faith is all these "i hate AAA slop" focused channels do, and people eat it up.
Bungie is one of the only studios I see that regularly keeps a live service up for a long time so I don't think they would shut it down in a year. Let's just hope they keep adding content to the game like Helldivers or other games with similar strategies.
They're not gonna abandon it because they've put too much money into it? Didn't Concord cost them around double the amount Marathon has?
Sony lost so many Billions from those games
The presumption is that they can’t afford to do that twice in a row.
Schreir and the journos will still pretend the elephant in the room isn’t there
I love how Megacrit legitimately felt bad about the tweet and reached out to apologize for what was honestly harmless sarcasm
Lost a little respect for the channel after seeing that he didn't bother to mention that it was in fact not a tongue in cheek slight at Marathon, but Tweeted before they saw the numbers climb to where it was. They fully expected Marathon to outshine their own release.
@Riastrad04he does mention it, wtf are you talking about?
Harmless, but also hardly professional. Then again, this is thevideo game industry we're talking about, they're this way more often than not overall.
Tbh, the term ″professional″ is something weird if you think about it. To be a ″professional″ you basically have to be an emotionless robot following an arbitrary scrip. And I don't know, but to me that doesn't feel human, nor genuine, nor appealing. Am I making sense?
@ojeritoayalaProfessional standards of behavior may not always be appealing, but they emerged for a reason.
21:30 I simply don't want to be an investor. I want to be a gamer. It's not my job to hope for some uncertain future, games exist to be enjoyed in the present. So either they're good enough to be enjoyed in the present, or they're forgotten.
if only Bungie had focused their efforts on repairing their image for their most popular IP.
People are tired of corporate slop across the board. Food, entertainment, video games, etc. Slop fatigue.
Marathon might've been a success if it came out 5 years ago. Today? They're out of touch and tone-deaf.
I have fatigue over the word slop, too
@bobbobberson4295 I'll stop calling things slop when they stop being slop
Example: McDonalds, Hollywood celebs and their pandering to woke mob is the Grammys, Highguard
It's a bit unfair to call Marathon slop. It's actually quite unique and not a "paint by numbers" kind of game, you can tell the devs actually put in real effort into it if you played for a few hours. It has a 90% score on Steam and a 4.7 out of 5 on the Playstation store. So people that actually bought and played the game are having a blast. It's the people that saw a few trailers and their favorite content creator bash it that just ended up forming this weird echo chamber of hating on the game calling it slop while never having played it themselves.
Marathon is a hardcore extraction shooter that is not casual friendly, so it'll never have mass appeal. And that's ok. A game doesn't need to appeal to the masses to be considered good. Interestingly enough, as of typing this comment Marathon is 3rd place in top Steam sellers, and is currently outselling Resident Evil Reqium and Crimson Desert today. That doesn't scream some slop game that is universally hated to me.
I never saw any advertising for marathon, just the controversies.
I happened to see a few ads for it when my dad was watching RUclips on his living room TV. They honestly left me more confused than anything. I don't think even Sony knows how to sell this to people.
You didnt notice the push of streamers playing it and urging everyone to try it? Because for a week it seemed like every content creator that plays fps whatsoever was attempting to cram it down our throats.
Depends where you live and depends what's your algorithm feeding you.
Really? ALL the top streamers were paid to the play the game not just for the server slam, but the first week of release on top of that. Plus the millions of marathon ads I'm getting every time I open up any app.
sad but true, im enjoying the game tho.
"Just another rougue-like" meanwhile Marathon is "just another extraction shooter"
yeah kinda sad ppl say that .... and here we are looking them releasing this ... about right after we already got good extraction shooter already ( arc raiders ) , so you are extremely right :D
Bungie letting Destiny 2 waste away for Marathon upsets me beyond belief.
Trust in the AAA industry is at an all time low. Simple really, especially after the whole Marathon debacle.
I can’t get over the fact that I bought Destiny 2 back in 2016, but due to being super busy with a lot of things in life I didn’t get around to finishing the campaign until later, but when I came back it was just…gone. I couldn’t play what I paid for. That was never true of the first Destiny, which I still have installed on Xbox One, but I just gave up on the sequel entirely.
Yeah they not only nuked the entire vanilla campaign they also erased entire expansions worth of content. They just up and deleted like $300 worth of content i paid for. I understand that it wasnt the most thrilling content at that point and it was making the game loading times almost unbearable because of server bloat but I cant believe how nonchalant they were about the product I paid for.
@TheGreatMilksteak It's a reflection of stupid choices that, by the time they were making _Destiny 2,_ they had to know were stupid choices.
Assuming those excuses were actually legitimate and not an attempt to add FOMO incentive to currently available content.
Yeah that's one of the most stupid things I've seen in this industry. Bungie deserves to go under
@TheGreatMilksteak literal theft. They deserve to go out of business.
Yeah, i stopped playing D2 after the first couple DLCs, it was fine, but i could see they were repeating the mistakes of the first game so bailed. Then i discovered that they straight up just removed the game i bought, deleted from existence.
Live service makes me instantly ignore it fuck live service and everything it stands for
Compared to highguard marathon is a masterpiece lol. It has its problems though. But blocking the anti cheat off Linux and steam deck/handhelds is just weird in this day and age. They would've garnered way more positive good will if they even included that.
So, you'll ignore Minecraft and Team Fortress 2?
@spakentruth it can be a real Masterpiece, people just don't have the money, the time or the energy to play another live service. The only ones who don't see it are the forever online/streamers or the "we never played a game in my life" executives.
@spakentruthmarathon is in no way shape or form a masterpiece, you must have severe brain damage 😂
@ocoolwowthat's why I said "compared to highguard it looks like a masterpiece" no way. I think marathon is great in a lot of aspects but no not a masterpiece.
People need to make sure they are truly supporting indie and not billion dollar companies pretending they are indie
Corpo-slop can't beat real, passionate gaming.
4:30 marathon plastic assets are melting after that burn😂😂
We refuse to eat the slop.
Shall we make a club? "Refuse-to-eat-slop club" or something like that.
That Bilmuri shirt, is in fact, a LEGENDARY DROP
You touched on something really important for me. Games that are always there, when you want to play again.
I'm exhausted of live service games because it always feels like a grind, like a job. If you stop you are left behind.
Where winds meet was a game I thought I would play for many years, but the stamina and other mechanics that basically want to force you to play, made me give up on it, even after the 70 euros I spent on skins.
I think this is the REAL PROBLEM, with live service nowadays. They are always a grind, always a "you have to play every other day or you are left behind" type of games.
I'm genuinely exhausted by this.
Why would you put any money into Where Winds Meet? It is a mobile game with some polish. They limit your progression daily to force you to their online chat room, because that's all online is with no quests. This then makes you see everyone with their cosmetics giving you FOMO and making you drop money on their over priced mounts and kimonos. The game is a massive ripoff idk why people liked it.
You could also just not fomo in shit too then you wouldn't feel so "left behind"
FOMO always ends up with exhaustion and complete distain for the product. Having a game that is complete and lays out the entire offering before you instead of drip feeding paid products or "You must" play every day or you drop off is just a desperate attempt to artificially inflate player numbers because they know the base product simply isn't good enough to hold your attention.
Warframe is the only one of these that I feel is done right. Almost everything that has a timer on it always comes back around at some point, and not playing for a while doesn't leave you behind hardly at all. I stopped playing for a couple years at one point, and was able to jump in pretty much without issue.
We need more games like this, that don't abuse fomo or feel like a grind.
Without FOMO, what would incentivize players to keep playing the same game into perpetuity? Especially these newer games, when literally every game in existence could be played instead and those older classics (the games that other devs want to replicate the massive success of) have decades of community and goodwill built up behind them
edit: I'm not being apologetic for the companies engaging in FOMO, just pointing out that is what AAA companies are blatantly hitching their wagons on to ensure good player retention and game sales/microtransaction figures into perpetuity for their company's shareholders
0:34 Developer- “Have you seen all these indie games crushing the AAA competition with a fraction of the employees and funding?!”
Publisher- “Yeah, crazy right?…Anywho here’s 500 million dollars for your PvP extraction shooter, will check on you 6 years from now”
"Oh, make sure you get some of that Hero Shooter mechanics and live service stuff in there while you are at it"
publisher: we need to beat fortnite!! we need that fortnite money!!! we love some fortnite money, gimme gimme gimme. trend chasers instead of trend makers
@thefgcsensei4482 "And microtransactions!!!"
I could make a better game than bungie for like $30 and compliment.
I present to you gnob. It’s like gnop but open world and you get to collect all the balls you can dream of.
"remember to use some of that money to hire psychologist to suck ppls wallets dry"
As off note .. ppl who take that job should be 4 ever shunned in doctor "community"
Big developers “oh look this genre is trending, let’s quickly release that type of game”, indies and capcom “let’s just make a game we love for fans”
Gotta love Capcom devs for pushing back against management. RE9 was supposed to be an open world coop shooter.
Trends always fall and change by time
@mikew1080WHAT?! I don't even play RE but damn ya'll dodged a bullet!
imagine trying to sell the concept of your game to aaa game companies board. “this game i think is fun” vs a lot of players already playing this genre
@MeMe-d2x9kits like trying to explain what is 67, looksmaxximg to boomers
the triforce of trash, concord, Highguard and marathon
I'm not personally a fan of rogue-lites, and mostly find card games and deck-builders really boring; but man am I so genuinely happy to see another indie smash hit just dismantling the current "AAA" industry! I will forever be for the indie renaissance we're currently living through.
it's not dismantling the AAA industry lol
I also felt that way a few years ago! I started to give a couple a chance out of boredom and man they can be really addicting if made well like StS2
@syla_cs I guess you haven't been paying attention to all the companies shutting down and devs getting layed off for the last few years.
Out of touch. 😂
I heard him bring up Slay the Spire and rolled my eyes hard. I don't think it's as great as people are cracking it up to be.
@spookydoobies444it's actually better
To be fair, the mega crit post was before they hit the players numbers they eventually did..and they were only being sarcastic at the time
AAA studios keep chasing a never - ending revenue source instead of just making a fun game. Every part of it is designed to make as much money as possible and shut it all down the second it isn't raking in cash. People see right through it.
Slay the spire 2 was made by a group of devs that genuinely loved what they were making and the whole goal was to make something they found fun to play and it shows.
Agreed. These AAA devs are instructed to make whatever cash-printing trend is popping off (hero shooter, extraction shooter, etc.), but corporate doesn't realize that in 2-5 years when the game eventually comes out, the landscape has changed & you're too late, gamers have moved on. Games made w/ passion & quality succeed regardless of genre, but when you're a creatively bankrupt mega-studio, that's not gonna happen.
That's why the big publishers are buying all the smaller studios to eliminate the competition and limit our choices.
i thought it was gonna suck but marathon is actually amazing.
Keep in mind almost every streamer who’s been promoting Marathon, is being paid by Bungie to do sponsored streams lol
And thus, their shilling and defense falls on deaf ears. The words of the sponsored are invalid. Especially if they're trying as hard to defend the product as they are.
Exactly brother, even TBP who plays it offline due to the brainless hate. You're 100% right on this!
I expected he will mention the point pack thing. The oldest trick in the live service book they had to semi walk back and pretend they'd do the same if the game was popular. Old bungie is long gone.
And over half look miserable while they play. 😂
I learned from Multiversus to never play nor spend money on f2p games ever again. I'm not going to risk developing an attachment to something with an expiration date and never be able to play it again.
this is why i prefer GOG than other platforms, i buy the game, and i can save the installer file and that copy of the game is mine til i die...i can play it any time, re-install in a different computer as many times i want.
@graphosencrenoir4006GOG is awesome, but it really doesn't help if a shutdown game requires connecting to a server that's also shutdown to work in the first place. Luckily, Multiversus is playable offline, but not every shutdown live service is as lucky. That's where the community comes in 😉
I played Slay the Spire on android and genuinely had a blast, unlocked everything and when I had enough I just deleted it. A year or two later, I re-downloaded it and to my dismay I lost my save file. I still played, knowing I have to start over and ended up playing for another 50+ hours until now. I'm amazed by how EASY it was for them to pull me back in, even if I accidentally got rid of my file. Great game, 10/10
Wait there's a mobile port? NO WONDER WHY IT'S SELLING!!!
8:56 People say that but Sony lost maybe $400M with Concord. With Bungie they lost more than $4000M!
4.6 billion to be exact 😅
Weird way to spell Billion
$4000M sounds too ridiculous to be accurate lol but it is
@kjax139yes you’re right but it’s true
@TheSwagmasterJayFAAAHHH!
9:50 shroud lol
shroud is a tool and the most boring person I've never needed to see
Reminder that despite all his money giving him a cushy existence he can't be bothered to get a driver's license. Terminally online gamer
@silence433lol what?
It makes me so happy for the developers who spent all that time thinking things could totally flop and it could be a complete waste of time... Absolutely inspiring. Creativity reigns supreme!
I ignored Marathon after I learned the stole art and have done so many times before.
4:56 I am not even joking when I say this video is how I learned Marathon was released, I thought it was later this month. Man I have been deep in those Slay the Spire 2 caves and I ain't leaving anytime soon.
I knew cause Sony through it on my notifications. I don't play a lot of multi-player, though.
"If it dies, it dies."
Ivan Drago
Plagiarism will make me god! Lord Bungo...AWAY
CEO of Bungie
8:00 Edmund was saying in one of his interviews that he released a buggy game on launch and that HAUNTED the sales forever. Game devs need to learn this
Lmao no they don't. Look at no man's sky. They succeeded, so now devs all over have been told they don't need to try, ever again.
Release slop, and slowly do your actual job if you feel like being nice to your community
@adenso4201 No Man’s Sky and Cyberpunk could be counted as a different issue. In the marketing, the Internet was mostly hyped for those games’ potential, but then the execution specifically was disappointing when ppl played the games. They had a dream and hope that dream could still come true. Starfield is a similar situation that, however, did not recover afaik. But opinions were conflicted on at one at least.
Games like Marathon, Concord, and High Guard could have bothered delaying to address issues brought up in their poor reception, but instead they put out games that disappoint. The teams behind all of them seem so full of it that they didn’t think there was any worth in considering the players’ opinion.
Unfortunately for Marathon, the internet was not hyping it up before release. They needed to change ppl’s minds with the game’s launch, not admit that the launch could have and should have been better. But at least this comes off as a bit humble and seeking to improve, versus the other two outright blaming the players for any loss.
@DuttMixo I think Edmund was talking about the Legend of Bum-bo from what I gathered. Messiest launch that got him to think about how to release other stuff
I forgot marathon even came out honestly I been more focused on crimson desert coming out soon.
100% i felt the same as 13:54 when i stop playing marathon its exhasiting. I sometimes feel happier closing the game, and i would say i enjoy the game for the most part. The switch to slay the spire 2 i felt none of that, it just felt like a good game lol and i was having a blast excited to return. I spent most of the weekend trying to find the hook in marathon. I still havent found it, but the hook in slay the spire is felt on the first run.
There’s no one on my friends list playing marathon. The friend list is mostly from people I met on destiny1.
7:12 Cryo Archives the map is complete. The community is meant to unlock it through puzzles. That’s why it’s not available right now.
You're assuming he saying it in good faith. He literally compared it to veilguard. Not tarkov, not Arc, not another live service game. It just chud bait.
@GreiverFenix He compared it to Veilguard because that was the closest comparison in terms of numbers. He wasn't talking about the type of game, but the number of players online to try and gauge how well the game has sold in the absence of official numbers.
@dianwei32sloptuber aint gonna give you attention, bro. This dude is a moron
@dianwei32it has 20k as of typing during a workday whose audience is late 20 early 30 fps goblins. Who are prolly working or at school. It peaked at 66k last night you guys lie as you breathe . Anyone could look up the steam chart. 87% positive reviews 4.65 average and it's retaining players.
Yeah he comparing it to veilguard a game that was review bombed and couldn't even be given away for free and that is a bad comparison and disingenuous. He should've compared ot to Arc or Tarkov.
I actually didn't know that, I had heard about ARG elements and similarities to vault of glass but the point still stands that holding of reviews for content most players won't seem is pointless.
Here is a thing, they try to psyop everyone, but unless they can outlive 3-5 generations of humanity or vampires were real, they wouldn’t succeed, as all those that want to change and control everything was either decrepit or halfway there.
the stop killing games initiative might put a blocker to the attitude of "just throw live service games at the wall and see what sticks", as they'll have to either inform players of exactly when the servers go offline, or make an offline mode that the players can use to keep playing when it shuts down.
Somehow I didnt get a single marathon advertisment anywhere.
I think the budget was mostly spent on streamers. Of which there were plenty urging everyone to play presumably because they were paid to promote it. I bet a good portion of the player base was just streamer audiences and they weren't there for the game so much as they were to play with the streamer.
I didn't get for STS 2 either but a lot of youtubers I follow decided to play it :D. Next weekend I'll buy it too because seems way better than the first
Lucky
That’s interesting. I haven’t seen any either besides content creators on RUclips and Twitch. It’s like they don’t want to push this to a normie or casual audience 🤔
@yourUserNameHere2 what a waste of money 😂 honestly streamers are not good advertising to be honest
I love the more refined artwork on the cards in Slay the Spire 2. It’s gorgeous. Also the enemies’ animations are so nice and smooth, especially the ones with tendrils or vines wiggling around
Totally agreed, but I still miss the beta art for the cards.
Let's be real we never play these games for the animations or art. Its all in the gameplay, the choices, the deckbuilding, the challenge. And these guys know how to deliver all that. And more.
@kobarsos82 of course, I just also appreciate the artists work a lot
@NMG1470Yeah, I have to agree with this. A good looking game brings people to your game, but terrible mechanics divide people and cause some to flee if you're not good at actually programming good battles or other things.
@richardklein1167 Yep, the gameplay was always going to be solid, so it’s a nice treat that it looks so good on top of that
9:49 “Come on guy.” Brutal.
That Bilmuri shirt goes hard.
CRANKINMYMF’INHOG
Slay the spire 2 actually shines even more so in multiplayer. I highly recommend buying it for a friend.
My friend and I absolutely love the game, I second this!
Marathon is nowhere near the success Sony expects it to be.
Sony cannot find success even if it bite them on the ass. They had that happen on accident with Helldivers 2 and still kicked the dog with the account requirement garbage they tried to pull. Literally every other move that have made in the last 5 years as been the wrong one.
@InfernusdomniAZ It's because Sony want to pull their service back to being more console focused and Helldivers blew up on PC going against the narrative they wish to spin to their investors going forward. Steam really hits these big companies in the feels because of the publicly displayed player counts and even though investors are normally ignorant to these things Sony have no way to swing bad numbers when they're public.
It's the reason Playstation fans push the narrative of PC being a smaller platform than their console because "exclusives" They'll also blame moding and piracy but the truth is Sony have been at similar levels to Microsoft people just didn't want to admit how bad the executive decision making of Sony has truly sunk to.
They spent billions for this.
It is sad for me because if you are into extraction genre it is a very solid entry. I want it to continue being supported but Sony is usually short sighted
@InfernusdomniAZ Sony cancelled Days Gone sequel and butchered Bend studio - very talented and passionate people. Sony close all it's Japanese studios, that were a trademark of Sony in older times. If PS had a lot of Japanese exclusive with creative freedom - it would beat Nintendo and have so many system sellers now.
1st rule of emergency medicine: "Everything stops bleeding eventually"
16:45 is man literally fighting a waterfall?
No, but that woman is.
Yep, and not only that when you finally get that waterfall HP to 0 it tries to take you down with it, killed a few of my runs 😅
🤣🤣🤣🤣 splash 💦
Once they decided on the genre, Sony/Bungie's fate was sealed. Imagine building an entire universe, filled with planets and people, corporations, war, millennia of history and technology...just to make a closed loop FPS. Marathon could have been an epic single player experience like old school Halo, with a tiny extraction shooter as an alternate game mode.
it was an epic single player experience the original trilogy which I'm pretty sure you can get for free
They didn’t even do much building they took the original marathon trilogy and they super watered it down and threw a bunch of bright contrasting colors on it.
@jakesurgey5617 It's no excuse for Sony and Bungie to burn millions in a genre nobody cares about when they could've remade the OG Marathon.
And before you says something dumb like "it's the most profitable genre, people care" No they don't, all the people who do are already invested in one or a couple live service shooters. That's why live services keep flopping. The only people who are are already busy.
Marathon used to be a FPS that existed in the days before Bungie had even made Halo 1
It was the first FPS to introduce the concept of looking around with your mouse
It had more of a story than most of the games around that time did
Then the revival used the interesting story and lore from the original games to make a damned extraction shooter
@Hemlock32umm... Doom had a mouse support from the start. In fact demos you see when launching the original 1993 game were recorded with mouse+keyboard
Man a singleplayer Marathon would have been great. The Original Marathon Trilogie had such a great story and mood.
Sorry, no can do! Gotta be a live service slopfest, the clueless investors demand it!
So true! I saw a video on the history of Destiny today and as someone who never played it I was blown away.
If Bungie had made Marathon more like that it would have sold millions
Perfect quote: "Money can buy attention but not interest"
5:11 and yet i haven't seen anything about it...
Me too 😂
"how many times are we gonna have to teach you this lesson old man!"
Mega Crit said their game was just chicken noodle soup....
Peeps REALLY wanted chicken noodle soup.
Homemade with honest (not stolen) art and a loving hand stiring the pot.
For the stolen art thing:
the artist 'Antireal' found her art stolen in the Marathon April Alpha, Bungie investigated it and confirmed it, a former artist who worked on Marathon in the initial stages put it there either to steal or as place holder art (the game was in development for like 7 years, its cycled through its fair share of devs), so they paid her, removed the art, and put her in the credits as a "Visual Design Consultant'. Also it was like 3-4 pieces of art (not that the amount matters, but some seem to think all of Marathon's art/art style was stolen) and she said she was satisfied.
When everyone is trying to sell you either gourmet shit that's 100$ for a single grape sprinkled with some fancy sauce you won't even taste, or hyper nutritional mud that keeps you alive but tastes like you're eating wet tissue paper...
A simple but well made ham'n'cheese sandwich is going to feel like a feast.
"Permanence is a form of trust". Best statement in the entire video.
Slay the spire was essentially the grandfather of every roguelike deck builder. So of course the fans of the genre would flock to the second game.
Bungie can also sell their game too. If the art style and gameplay wasn't $#!+.
Dominion is the grandfather. Slay the Spire is the new kid revitalizing the genre.
15:47 FINALLY SOMEONE SAID IT! It creates such a needless divide amongst players and creates hostility. Personally it genuinely is a bit scary to get into a live service game like you said for this very reason. What happens if I spend a lot of time and money only for it all to go away? Now you can make the argument that all time and all money goes away, but take a game like warframe for example: I don’t have any problem spending my time and money on that game because it shows no signs of dying in the near future, meaning I can enjoy my time and money spent without worry. Just a thought. Agreeable points made here. Thank you.
Yet there’s 48k people playing warframe right now. Marathon has almost double that in the evenings. Must be “SO CONCERNING”, and “DOESNT LOOK GOOD”. Game must be dead! 😢
@KataslapperThats actually kind of sad that Marathon is only barely doubling the playercount of a game that came out 13 years ago lol.
Considering the team that made it, the money AND time spent developing it, and the amount they spent on marketing, and the fact that it came out like a week ago. Marathon should be 10x the playercount of Warframe.
Also keep in mind, the gap between Marathon and Warframes playercount is only going to get smaller and smaller in the coming weeks. You'll see, lol.
ALSO, the fact that you had to add the qualifier "in the evenings" makes your point even more sad 😂
@bra@bradeygein389 I’m just confused as to why people hate something that is doing something new. Everyone keeps blabbing about how it SHOULD have so many players playing it. But it doesn’t? Why SHOULD it? What’s your reasoning? I’m glad it doesn’t have a shit load of players. I’ve been on the hate train for so many years against live service shit bags like concord and high guard, but seeing this level of enthusiasm towards wishing… HOPING.. a game fails is what is sad. Not a single original thought about the game or an attempt to try it out. Just mindless first glances and stolen opinions from RUclipsrs and redditors. Have you played it? And if it wasn’t for you, that’s fine! I respect that. I just can’t believe I’m on the other side of the hate this time. It’s insane. I never played Destiny because I thought it was boring as hell. This game has its hooks in me
@Kataslapperespecially since the cryo final boss has not been dropped yet, honestly i think that could be the “vault of glass” moment to propel marathon higher, but base level marathon is a really fun game; especially with a team of buddies freaking out over comms. Everyone can have their opinion but lets all have some perspective, this is not some woke slop….and what game in recent history has run with amazing opimization day one launch day?
@Kataslapper honestly, marathon pvp feels like what destiny pvp could have been
I'm currently on like 160h in Mewgenics, and have made some insane cats, playing through Hard mode, and I just cannot stop playing.
My brother plays that! I saw an ad for it and thought, "This game looks so insane it can't be real." Turns out I was wrong, but you know hearing from someone else that a game exists and sounds fun often makes me think about getting it at least.
I love mewgenics but it doesn’t give me the “one more run” addiction as much as STS2. It’s probably just because of it’s cat management section, almost a chore in some sense, even though I appreciate it as a game mechanic
That's how I was too. I replayed Slay the Spire 1 to see if I can reignite that feeling of wanting to play more StS with the sequel but each time my thoughts kept going back to Mewgenics. With StS the rng of relics and cards felt way more unforgiving. With Mewgenics since you have multiple cats you only really need one of them to be very strong and have the others just support them.
There's also just a ton of layers to Mewgenics to work around. Cat management can get a little annoying and I do wish there was a much easier way to categorize and manage them but there's also a charm about it and finding a new stray, putting breeding rooms together to make the best lineage of cats. It's just a ton of fun.
Also the music is banger.
' Once I'm in, I don't come out ' . . . bars!
This always happens because they are incapable of learning from their mistakes. They just keep repeating the same mistakes over and over again.
Bungie refuses to learn from mistakes. They just keep just doing the same things over and over.
3:30 To be fair though - Veilguard was a singleplayer RPG. Marathon is a multiplayer extraction shooter. While the initial sales may be somewhat comparable, I don't think this comparison works too well overall. Certainly not in terms of the game's health in the near future.
I think LD is making a mistake not saying the game is a failure. It absolutely is. It's just a "normal" flop, and not a mega-catastrophe like Concord/Highguard.
Initially, they were making Veilguard as a multiplayer but mid development they decided to change into a singleplayer and for god sake, you can notice it by how bad is designed as a singleplayer, im not saying that it would have better as multiplayer, but still bad game
@patriciofelipe4376 Oh yea, it's shit either way, that much is certain haha
@CaptainOverkill I dunno, I mean, he's right in stating that it certainly is a flop for Bungie in particular given their track record. But generally I wouldn't necessarily consider it a flop judged on its own merits. Extraction shooters are a fairly niche genre (though exceptions apply), it would never have seen popularity similar to Destiny, let alone Halo. They must have known that. It seems like the game has its audience and might potentially do well enough over time if they don't fuck it up. Whether it will do well enough to recoup its development cost is another matter entirely, but that depends on its budget (from what I can find online estimates diverge wildly, from sub-100 million if they leveraged asset reuse from destiny to 350-400 million). Overall it was a massive gamble and likely shouldn't have been made to begin with, but it doesn't do poorly enough to warrant immediate shutdown like Concord or Highguard, so its long-term success massively hinges on updates. I'd say it's too early to tell whether it's a flop overall at this point.
Don’t get me wrong I never thought marathon was going to be a terrible game, but the biggest problem that I saw, was simple, bungie could make marathon the greatest game of all time……. But this is being made by a bungie who have torched its reputation, with the controversies and vaulting content, now don’t get me wrong a million copies sold isn’t bad at all…… but we also need to remember PlayStation bought bungie for around 2.6 billion dollars if I remember right so……. Ultimately PlayStation will ultimately decide if the game sticks around, now while I hope Sony is okay with this game being like helldivers 2, a core but small audience that has potential to grow…… but something tells me PlayStation won’t think like that
Comparing apples to oranges man. One is headed by a team that has been absolutely amazing with its track record, in listening to its playerbase, and the other has destroyed its once loyal and devote player base update after update, year after year and shown that its impossible to please its playerbase with how hostile and negative they are towards change or anything new.
My thought process went: "Marathon? what's that? Oh, it's another extraction shooter? Don't care."
And I went back to chipping away at my bloated steam library of games I still haven't downloaded yet lol
So the game wasn't for you, like Arc Raiders too.
That's fine.
@MetranomixNah, because Arc Raiders is actually fun to play. Marathon is not.
@M@Mojave_Ranger_NCR Arc is a good game but I genuinely think marathon is better. Its overall more enjoyable and interesting. The OP on the other hand probably doesn’t even like multiplayer titles. So theres that.
@lambousginiguccigod2007that’s your assessment based off a one off comment? Yikes, punditry is not in the cards for you I’m sorry to say. All of my top 5 most played games are multiplayer, one of them being Hunt Showdown with 500 or so hours played. I’m tired of extraction shooters, it’s an overly saturated market with too many bargain bin Arc Raiders and not enough creativity to set themselves apart from the pack. It’s just another tired trend that’s getting beaten to death before the next trend sets in.
@Mojave_Ranger_NCRspoken like a true person who never touched marathon and made their mind up because a hive mind said so😂
Y call it Marathon if they are Sprinting for Layoffs?!
Marathon to the bottom.
Marathon looks as if someone who ate a pack of crayons went on and puked all over the place
I keep hearing from devs that steam numbers don’t mean anything, yet all the AAA games that have these drop offs are shutting down studios. Sure looks like these stats mean something to someone, and they seem to be the investors and executives, ya know, the people who make the decisions.
For me, Marathon's reputation will be forever tarnished with "corporate plagiarism". Even if they've since fixed it, I will never get that association out of my head.
I think the reason for the reputation loss is it's just more than marathon's plagiarism of antireal Bungie destiny art theft puts them in the same ballpark as Activision using A.I. art for CODit's just strikes me as they are willing to be scummy behind the scenes if it means saving the effort and/or money.
Slay the Spire 2 looks like a passion project.
Marathon looks like 'Extraction-shooter number 2541', with a controversy of stealing art during its development.
I'm glad they at least gave anti real credit in the end and even made her a paid consultant on the art. It's just a shitty saga
I mean to Marathons credit, no other game on the market looks like that so i feel like "extraction-shooter number 2541" isnt very accurate considering most of the very small number of extraction shooters are Tarkov clones in design and visuals. Not that it really changes most of the issues here, im pretty sure most of their advertising WAS their art "stealing" controvery (which did end up being resolved). I refunded it personally.
Marathon genuinely looks like a game that could feasibly be made by a team of people who are developers in their free time.
I almost never stream you tube through my tv. But i noticed that right away. That the ads were completely out of control when you try and watch you tube on your tv.
Marathon goes F2P when?
That's not like Bungie, cmon man. Be realistic. It's way more likely that Marathon will just be left with no content or updates for years before being replaced by it's new live service
never
@HoboHastur thats what we thought about destiny 2 and that had WAY more content than marathon so we'll see
Only when they start cutting paid content
When I can play Marathon free of charge likes Fortnite???
The amount of corporate bootlicking that still occurs these days will never cease to amaze and terrify me.
It’s always going to happen. Bootlicking pays higher than real jobs do.
Don't act like you wouldnt turn down a 100k+ sponsorship just to play a videogame😂
If you would, shows that you've never been poor and struggled.
Why are they licking Sony live service games ? Such a loser
These are Bots. Not real people.
All you had to say was the game's live service and I didn't want to play marathon
I think it's very disingenuous to call games that will shut down immediately "live service".
Cause it isn't a service, and it sure isn't gonna live for long.
16:47 *somewhere deep in the ruins of Aperture Science*
PotaDOS: "Oh good, that still works"
4:25 based as fuck
They thought they wouldn’t pass marathon they actually sent that as a joke thinking they wouldn’t, but sent a tweet after saying they meant that as a joke 😅
@DualHitter this, the tweet itself was right after their release IIRC, when they didn't even have the first day numbers information