Valve veteran Chet Faliszek doesn't know where Bungie and corporate owner Sony can go from here as the developer's once-evergreen live-service game Destiny 2 prepares to walk into the sunset.
The storied studio earlier this month announced that Destiny 2's final update will drop on June 9, at which point it'll remain playable and the company will begin incubating other projects, it said. Reports then claimed Destiny 3 isn't in active development and layoffs were also expected for the devs who don't get moved onto Marathon.
In a new video reacting to the news, Portal and Left 4 Dead writer Chet Faliszek said he's "just super bummed out because closing Destiny 2 on June 9 means they don't need a whole bunch of people to keep Destiny 2 going and they're not doing a Destiny 3." He then laments, "Marathon was the big bet and that did not hit. Sony bought Bungie for their multiplayer games… I don't think Sony cares anymore, right?"
Faliszek also explains why there's no easy path forward for Bungie. On paper, Destiny 3 might be the company's safest bet, but Faliszek explains big publishers want to invest in live-service games that can live forever and Bungie's last stab at that wasn't exactly immortal. So Sony might be hesitant to drop hundreds of million of dollars on the threequel.
"Counter-Strike's been going on since 1997," he says. "These games, once they find an audience, can live forever, and that's what these publishers are chasing."
Toying with the idea of the studio spinning off to make multiple smaller projects, Faliszek also concludes that "it doesn't work, it doesn't scale inside of these companies that are this big because it's got a couple problems." The first is that it's really tough, and sometimes really expensive, to get anyone to care about something original. He points to how Valve apparently spent $35 million on TV ads for Left 4 Dead 2, a sequel to a beloved game, in the lead up to its launch, so an original, smaller project won't be any cheaper to market.
Elsewhere, a former Destiny lead suggested that a remaster of the first game wasn't a safe bet either, leaving Bungie stuck between a rock and an endless abyss of risky possibilities.
Destiny 2's final update sounds so good that it just makes the game's death hurt even more
