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- [00:01]
Rob Zachny
This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome.
- [00:03]
Patrick
You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome? That's new.
- [00:07]
Rob Zachny
It can help you with practically anything
- [00:08]
Patrick
on the web, like restoring a vintage
- [00:10]
Rob Zachny
motorcycle from a 50 page restoration block.
- [00:13]
Patrick
Or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it, ready to make anything online make sense.
- [00:20]
Rob Zachny
There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required compatibility and availability. Veris18 hello, my name is Joseph Cox, co founder of 404 Media. I'd like to make the following statement. This is my own personal opinion and doesn't represent that of 404 Media as a whole. It is outrageous to record a Marathon conversation without me. I am currently cradle level 67, the highest out of our playing group and the closest to the maximum of cradle level 70. I have completed 5 out of 6 of the AI systems subroutines the End Game activity. I am regularly providing new information about the current meta to our friends. I wish you the best but know our listeners are missing out by my absence.
- [01:12]
Joseph Cox
Thank you.
- [01:17]
Patrick
Hello and welcome to the four four Media podcast where we bring you unparalleled access to hidden worlds, both online and IRL. Four4Media is journalist, founded and needs your support. To subscribe, go to Four4Media Co as well as bonus content every single week. Subscribers also get access to additional episodes where we respond to their best comments and they get early access to our interview series. Gain access to that content at Four4Media CEO. This week we're joined by Robert Zachny. Rob was my colleague at Vice, where he worked at our gaming vertical Waypoint, but he is a renaissance man, a polymath. He's now a co founder of remap, a website and podcast about video games, which also happens to be my favorite podcast. He also hosts Shift F1, a podcast about Formula One and a more Civilized Age, a podcast that I believe started as a rewatch of the Clone wars but has since expanded to every corner of Star wars lore. Recommend you check all of these out. Rob is great. All of these podcasts are great. I wanted to have Rob on today because much like me and Joe, he's been obsessed with Bungie's extraction shooter Marathon. One of Rob's greatest skills is dissecting how and why games get their hooks into us, and what a game's popularity, or lack thereof in Marathon's case, might reveal about the state of the industry and culture more broadly. Rob, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.
- [02:51]
Rob Zachny
Thanks for having me and thanks for the very kind words.
- [02:54]
Patrick
I think the key question for this conversation is if we think Marathon is so great, why does it seem like there's a good chance it will end up as a catastrophic business decision for Bungie and PlayStation, which acquired Bungie for 3.7 billion in 2022? In order to work our way up to that first part of the question, I want to spend some time explaining what an Extraction Shooter is. I think everyone who is listening to this knows what a first person shooter is. They have played Call of Duty, they have played a battlefield, they know what a battle royale is because Fortnite is so huge. But extraction shooters, I think are still somewhat esoteric. Rob, how would you explain what this sob genre is and where it came from?
- [03:53]
Rob Zachny
Yeah, so an extraction shooter is I think, a cousin to the battle royale in some ways, but it's also an offshoot of the rpg, the sort of loot chasing rpg. Think of games like Diablo, where some of the fun is you're running around the world and opening chests and grabbing gear and see what you get. The Extraction Shooter takes that concept and applies it to the first person shooter. So where most shooters will do something fairly familiar, where you will have a loadout that you start with as a character class, right? Like, oh, I always like using this really nice heavy machine gun in this match. Or I'm a big fan of this shotgun. That's how I play the game. And so usually those games give you good equipment right out of the gate and you go into the round and you go fight. The Extraction Shooter to begin with often takes this position that good weapons, good gear is a finite resource. These things are rare and so you have to go and find them out in the world. But what you are able to take into the world on average is pretty poor quality. And so you're running around there in the world knowing other players are out there doing the same, frantically looking for loot that you can then turn around to use and shoot them. So you are basically running around and opening chests in the hopes of finding something like a M4 carbide with tons of optics and gear that you can then give you a competitive advantage in the round. The twist that the Extraction Shooter sort of offers and I think we're actually kind of working on a story about this over at remap, so I don't want to completely take a bite of my writer's style, but when we were talking about it during the pitch process, the place where I went was, I cannot remember an Extraction Shooter before Ubisoft's the Division. The Division was a very typical mmo. Tom Clancy Red Storm Entertainment Paranoid fantasy of what if the apocalypse happens? And the only thing saving America is a bunch of black ops sleeper agents seeded throughout the United States who then activate and solve the apocalypse with athleisure gear that's sort of branded as partner deals. And then like heavy assault weapons.
- [06:13]
Patrick
Yeah, your neighbor in rural Maine who has a collection of 200 guns will save the country.
- [06:18]
Rob Zachny
It turns out he's Delta Force in this construction and he will save the day.
- [06:24]
Patrick
But.
- [06:24]
Rob Zachny
So most of that game was a familiar. It's just an MMO with assault rifles running around New York in the aftermath of this apocalypse. But they introduced something called Dark zones, which were PvP areas you went in, and now, because it's an RPG, you have a persistent equipment list. You have sort of a chest that you take your loot back to and you sort of decide what you bring with you on missions in the Dark Zones, your loot was at risk if you were gunned down in the Dark Zones. You lost. You had brought into the Dark Zones with you, I think was the key thing there was. But the really important thing was the Dark Zones had the best loot. But in order to leave with that loot, you had to go to an area and summon an extraction vehicle, like a helicopter to come and repel you out of the zone. And those areas were known. And when you signaled it, other players saw that you were doing that, and they would know that someone is trying to leave with a lot of loot. And if they wanted a lot of loot, rather than go looking for it, they could come and shoot you and take the loot off your dead body. And so the Extraction Shooter is born. And these games prove very popular, but they are also, I think, considered sickos games. And part of it is because they're deeply masochistic. The learning curve for these is very punishing in part because again, as a new player, you don't have good gear, or if the game gives you a little good gear at the start, you will swiftly lose it because you don't know the game. And so the learning curve is one where you're experiencing a ton of failure, a ton of humiliation, as you are fighting players who literally have better equipment and map knowledge and are just using those two things to slaughter you right and left. But as you stick with it, you start to become a hunter yourself in those worlds. And I think that is a big part of the appeal, is that so many shooters, they can feel Very trivial. Oh, you didn't have a good game in Call of Duty. Doesn't matter. Round is over, restart battlefield, death is meaningless. You run out, you go shoot someone, maybe you get shot. Respawn, go see if you can take the zone. The extraction shooter, because there's stakes and because the scale is smaller, tends to be a higher stress, but maybe higher adrenaline experience. These are not lean back games. Everything that you get in those missions is at risk. You know, you are being hunted by other players. They're not playing objectives. You are the objective. That gives it a different feel and a very addictive one to people who start to really enjoy that feeling of vulnerability and risk.
- [09:08]
Patrick
I want to try and add one more thread to this history you laid out very well and let me know if you agree with it. I think, as you say, since the dawn of the multiplayer first person shooter or wherever you want to place it, but let's like randomly give it to Doom or something. People are logging in, you're dropped into a match, everybody is running around shooting each other. They're getting points, or maybe the team is getting enough points and they're winning. And that evolves over the years. You get kind of like this big generational shift with Call of Duty, which adds this RPG element you talk about. You have something that is a bit more higher stakes and precise, like Counter Strike. Which is why that I think eventually turns into an esports, right? Because it's like a very calculated, professionalized game. Halo, goldeneye, all this stuff. But in the background is lurking this more obscure, highly technical, highly demanding, really dense simulation in the form of Arma that is maybe more popular in Europe. A lot of people are playing it and I've always thought the idea of it was very appealing because it's such a dense simulation. So it's like if you're playing Call of Duty or you're playing Counter Strike and you want to go deeper, that is like a natural place to go. But a, the game is extremely technical. It's very difficult to even properly move your character because you can move it in such fine detail. You can lean halfway, you can crouch, you can prone. It's just very complicated. And then it also lacks a clear hook. Arma is a simulation to the extent that you're not just jumping into a game. You kind of have to first decide what the game is and build a scenario. It's more like wargaming where it's like, okay, well in this match we're going to put this battalion versus this battalion and then we're going to role play it. It's almost like a civil war reenactments or something. And then something happens. I think it's in the aughts where DAYZ comes along and it takes the material of this very dense simulation and gives it a very clear hook, which is you're dropped into this giant mattress that has this very detailed simulation in terms of like this is all the gear and you can pack it this way and you can equip it that way and bullet drops and just like all the physics of the shooting and stuff. But it's basically zombie survival, right? It's like you're a character. You start with nothing. You get into this map, you get better gear and you survive as long as you can. And from there you basically get two branches. One of them is pubg, which kind of simplifies that formula even more and that becomes Fortnite and the battle royale, which becomes a huge revolution for the business of video games, I guess. And then I would say that another offshoot of that is the Extraction shooter. Right. They're taking similar structures and kind of pushing them in different directions. And then one of them becomes this legacy of Tarkov Hunt, Ubisoft, the Division. I'm wondering if you agree that Dayz and this Euro Jank military nerd simulation is also kind of part of the legacy here of extraction shooters.
- [12:54]
Rob Zachny
I think it 100% is. I think part of it is PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds. PUBG does set a lot of the direction for this and that is it is taking its cues from Dayz, which begins with that highly simulational, highly technical Arma and Arma and that type of military sim. These are not games where the player is the hero. To your point, the whole war game model is that when you play it, you are one soldier among many. A multiplayer match. And if you are grazed by an assault rifle round, that's probably it for you. That's probably game over. This is not a thing where you crack the player's shield and then gun them down. So the stakes are very high. Who shoots first tends to win the encounter. Right. This is sort of a hallmark of the military sim where an unaware enemy is a dead enemy. And so it makes these things very much about controlling when and how you engage the opponent. I do think this is why in some ways Tarkov, but especially Hunt Showdown and I would argue Marathon as well, become games about trying to pull together a good image of what is happening in a round from very partial information sources. You become very attuned to the normal sounds of the map. You know what is normal. You start to gauge how if you hear gunshots, you start to develop a sense for those are across the map or those are right next door, somewhere in between. You become hyper aware of your surroundings in these games. And that does sort of come to us from that hardcore milsim history where this is not Halo, this is not Call of Duty where you are a. A bag of hit points that can tank a ton of gunshots from assault rifles or machine guns. You are a very vulnerable human. If you get tagged, you are out. And so that has. Even in a game like Marathon, where you do have shields, you can absorb quite a bit more damage. You still have this game that is constructed around hyper vigilance.
- [15:15]
Patrick
So I gather from listening to remap that you're like me in a sense, that you have dabbled in Tarkov, you have dabbled in Hunt. There's been a few other games along the way that are extraction shooters, and they seemed interesting to me, but I didn't even give them a spin. And then something about Marathon really, really got me. Like, I am now more than 200 hours in. I play it daily if I can. It's difficult, I'm busy, but I try to put in time every day. I'm heavily invested emotionally. I really love it for you. What is the difference? Like, why is this the one that got you?
- [16:00]
Rob Zachny
So I think one of the big differences just out of the gate is that this is a game from Bungie and it has in some ways a bungee feel, meaning that it is clearly a game that is connected through development, lineage, and the sort of craftsmanship that goes into games from the studio. It is connected to these other games in a way that feels really, really good in the context of an Extraction shooter. And so this is an extraction shooter that in some ways does feel a little bit like Halo. It does feel a little bit like Destiny, but it also feels a little more. They're all sci fi settings, so realistic is a very relative term here. But when we were talking about the milsim side of things and the sense of vulnerability and hardcoreness that is often lacking in especially like Destiny. Right. Destiny was more of the MMO style. You and your buddies wander around and you shoot monsters and then you get loot. And it's very low impact, low stress. It was a perfect. It was the ultimate sort of lean back, crack a beer, and just casually mow down some sci fi monsters with friends here. All those good mechanics, the things that Feel good in these games. Movement, the way weapon dynamics and traits, all those things are put in the service of a game that is much more lean forward, take this seriously, become completely absorbed in it. And as a side note, I think that is part of maybe why it is so arresting is that particularly for players of a certain age, in some ways Marathon builds a psychological wall around you when you are playing it that a lot of other games and genres do not. And that can become more important as you are juggling more responsibilities and you have things like families to worry about, taking care of the house, finances, job stuff, career. That stuff can always be lurking there in the background. What's kind of neat about an extraction shooter, and I think this is partly what drives it, is that your head just empties when you were playing one of these. In part because you're so hyper attuned to the game, you can't be holding space for what's my calendar look like tomorrow. So that stuff tends to drop away. But I think the big one is just that this is a game that feels good in a lot of the ways that Halo felt good, a lot of the ways that Destiny felt really, really good, but in a more dramatic, tension filled wrapper where tactics and teamwork and paying attention to your surroundings matter a hell of a lot more than they ever mattered in those other games I mentioned.
- [19:02]
Patrick
Yeah, I think that there are many things that I like about the game. There's all the stuff that you just mentioned about movement and the way guns feel and like the cadence of gun battles that Bungie is very good at. But it also feels like bunch this is the most unleashed of seeing Bungie creatively as a studio and you see that in every aspect of the game. Like visually it is very daring. Like it doesn't really like it wears its influence on its sleeves, I suppose, but it doesn't really look like other games.
- [19:46]
Rob Zachny
It's.
- [19:48]
Patrick
It has a very bold visual style, it has a very bold audio landscape.
- [19:55]
Rob Zachny
Something we should interject here because people may not be aware of this. Marathon, the game that just came out that we are talking about is A Long Absent, is a sequel basically to Marathon games that Bungie made back when they were developing shooters for Macintosh computers that Doom didn't go to Macintosh computers. Doom was shareware PC. And so people who play games on Mac have historically always been sort of a beleaguered set who don't have a lot of the games that are most popular. But Bungie was one of their developers and Marathon was a huge hit. It was one of the few games that people who were people were very partisan back then when it came to Mac versus PC, far more than they are now. And it was one of the few games where you would have even PC gamers saying, that looks awesome. But I think where that shows up here is in the 2000s and such a lot of shooters become. They start favoring more realistic or hyper realistic graphics, right? They're taking their aesthetic cues from the global War on Terror live leak videos of soldiers in combat, Saving Private Ryan with sort of desaturated color grading. And all these things impacted. Aesthetics is another term used for it. And so Marathon, to an extent, is quite pointedly harkening to the aesthetics of a mid-1990s Macintosh game where bright colors, chunky design in the way that things were always chunky when you only had low resolutions to work with. And so you go into this, and it is this kind of brilliant exercise in how do you make something in a world of like 4K and advanced lighting and all sort of the things that modern computers and graphics can do? How do you make a game to those specs that feels authentic to a Macintosh game from the mid-1990s? And the answer is, and I agree with your point here, one of the most visually arresting and unexpected games I played in years.
- [22:03]
Patrick
Yeah, it's almost as if it's picking up on a lost thread aesthetically. Right? Like it's rediscovering, you know, some lost school of painting or something. Right. It feels both old and grounded and then also entirely new and fresh at the same time. And I think that's really from the studio who just spent a decade making Destiny and before that, made Halo, which might as well be what you see in a dictionary when you look up a video game. It feels like very unleashed. It feels like them, like. And, you know, the reality is that they're not as independent as they used to be, but at least it feels creatively more free and daring. And one of the ways it does that, which you've alluded to, is that it's daring in the sense that it's asking the player for a lot. Like, to me, it's shocking. And other extraction shooters are like this. But I think it's pretty shocking to see the studio that made Halo, arguably, like, the most accessible first person shooter that was ever made, make a game that asks so much of you as the player and as a team of players. And I think the pinnacle of that in Marathon, like, the best example of it, is this map that is only Open a couple of days on the weekend called Cryo Archive. And to me, Cryo Archive is like, as somebody who just spent their whole lives playing first person shooters, and I feel like I have a physical memory of all these maps, like Dust 2 and Hangar 17 and Unreal Tournament. And just like these spaces are spaces where I've spent hours and hours of my life kind of running around, and I've just never seen something like this in a video game. Do you want to talk about what it is and why it's so different?
- [23:58]
Rob Zachny
Yeah. There's a meme that you see around a refuge as people rediscover it. I think it popped up on Reddit. Might have been an image or meme, but it's basically first person shooter levels in the 1990s. And it's this spaghetti diagram of all these branching hallways and cross crossroads, and it's this complete labyrinthine structure that Somehow in the 90s, the uber elite gamers that we all back. This is sort of the millennial gamer we used to drink from the hose. This is the equivalent of that meme form. And then you see the first person shooters in the 2010s, and it is effectively like a hallway with maybe a couple spokes going off of it that loop around and reconnect to the hallway. And the point is that now choice is an illusion in these things. They create the sense of there being an extensive world or there being other paths you could take, but you're actually walled off from them. Or if you aren't, they loop back quickly to what is, in design terms, like the critical path. Like this is the path the player is expected to walk to get to their next objective. And it's a little unfair, but it's not entirely misplaced. The Call of Duty campaign is a very cinematic campaign. It takes its cues from Half Life in a lot of ways. And those are both games that in order to have those big cinematic moments land, you couldn't get lost. You couldn't be wandering around an entire maze and miss the big cinematic moments. So you would sort of be guided at points to come and turn this particular corner and see this particular site. And it was all very exciting, very new. But by the 2010s, people were getting kind of exhausted of that. And they're like, do you remember when you used to be able to get literally lost in these levels and you sort of learn what the levels were? Cryo Archive is like the video game equivalent of that meme where if you hit the map key in the middle of the match, you will be presented with something like a map. It is not going to help you navigate because it is a complicated three dimensional space. Cryoarchive doesn't. It's not something you can easily lay out in two dimensions. So you look at that map and you get an idea of where you are relative to other things. But it doesn't quite match up with your experience of the space. Which is it is this honeycomb warren of complicated spaces. Cut lines of sight, things are above you, things are below you. Access points between these segments of the honeycomb are unclear. You know there are players out there. In fact, sometimes it feels like they're in the next room. How you get to the next room is a mystery. Where's the gap in the wall? You can hear them fighting just on either side of this wall. You don't know how to get to them at first. It takes a long time to develop that familiarity to understand how the pieces fit together. And again, you are trying to learn it while engaging a mix of the game's hardest robotic enemies. Marathon is a game where in addition to the threat presented by the players, there are tons of. The conceit for the game is you're all scavenging this lost colony from this generation ship that set out hundreds of years ago and all the colonists are dead. And you're trying to both loot the resources left and unravel the mystery of what happened to them. But the government that oversaw this effort has deployed tons of automated robots to keep the looters away in cryoarchive. These robots are beefier than they are in the other parts of the game. They have more shields, they have more hit points. And so every time you go to a new room or you hang out there too long, you will find yourself in a huge gun battle with just robot enemies that absorb a lot of punishment and will also carry some resources you need. And while you're fighting them, you also know that other teams are hearing that fighting. And now you're sort of giving away information by being stuck in there. So you're always as you're trying to learn this really complicated map, you're always in the middle of a gun battle. You can't linger too long and parse out what's happening. And then just as you start to get an idea of like, here's what we want to do with this run this round, odds are very good that another team storms into the room and kills your entire team in seconds. And so it is also maximally punishing. The key theme about Cryo Archive is just to get in there, you have to bring really elite gear, stuff that is tough to find in the other parts of Marathon.
- [28:24]
Patrick
There's a price of admission.
- [28:26]
Rob Zachny
Yeah. Which is a risk now, once you're in there. And so that is the other wrinkle, is that the stakes are literally higher with the gear you have to bring in. And then there's no way out unless you unlock it. It has an escape room dynamic. Now, Marathon's actually cool in that it has a lot of little mini mmo, raid or dungeon type structures seeded throughout it. But Cryoarchive is the one that they lean into this, where not only is the map complicated, not only is the risk really high, and the other teams you're going to be running into are carrying gear that is two or three times as good as what you'll find on other maps of Marathon. But while you're doing this, you're also trying to figure out, how does this map actually work? Like, how do we unlock this next vault? How do we get to the next stage? How do we unlock a place to extract from? All these things are things you were just sort of tossed into the deep end with Cryoarchive to figure out with your friends in these really stressful, highly intense chunks. And as a little bit of extra context, this is partly why I think this is partly something Bungie was trying to do with Marathon, which is how do you make it so that a little bit of content goes a long way? Destiny ran into a problem of you would release an expansion and players would just go, nom, nom, nom, delicious content. Love it. Where's the rest of it? And they start asking, where's the rest of it? Where's more? Within two weeks of the expansion coming out, right? There's people who just inhale that content. Anyone who plays an MMO is familiar with this problem that you can never produce new stuff to keep up with the rate that players can consume it. Destiny was always battling this problem. And so one answer they had to that was they would create these huge. Again, borrowing some parlance from MMOs, they create, like raid dungeons much longer experiences that you and your team went into. And you have to work collaboratively to get through and find the loot and beat the boss of the dungeon. And that stuff would extend the life of these things. But raids were undertaken by raid players immediately. It became a thing where a lot of players didn't do it because they didn't find raid groups, which anyone who plays an MMO is familiar with this, this problem of there are people who are around and there's people who are not, and the people who are not, are not going to get to go on the raids. But the other thing is there wasn't a lot of pressure to once people knew what the raid was and there was nothing to stop them from doing this, they could just go in and bash their heads against it until they figured it out and then reduce it down to guides and then they just seamlessly navigate through the raid. And so you would do all this work for, you know, in some cases, like literally over over a year, building this really elaborate, you know, set of puzzles and encounters for the really stymie players. And it would for about five minutes and then it becomes a walkthrough that you're just consulting and plowing your way through Cryovault because it is in the context of an extraction shooter and there's always the pressure of other teams there. It's like a raid where you're only going to get to really do it in little bite sized chunks before you get massacred again. And then you have to sort of figure out what do we do here? Were we on the right track? And so it is a way to create what would normally be a raid map that you and your friends would spend 12 hours on a weekend parsing and figuring out. And then you're kind of done with it. Now it becomes this destination where, oh, wow, Disney World is open, Epcot is open, but you better hustle because you're going to be shot there at any moment. And so you can never really get a complete picture of the whole. And so it makes that all that architectural work they've done, all that design they've done, it goes much further because you are not just allowed to inhabit the space and pick apart all its mysteries. You only get little bits and pieces of that around. The main thing you're concerned with, which is not getting mowed down by robots and enemies, enemy players.
- [32:53]
Patrick
The fact that you mentioned the origin of Marathon being on Mac actually made me think that in addition to all this architecture that you talked about, there's a real mystery to this space. Like there are secrets to unlock there that feel almost like Myst. I played Myst the first time, famously Myst. I think primarily a Mac game, or at least one that was popular with Mac players. I never played it because I was a PC person and also did not have the patience for it, but I played the remake that came out a couple years ago and playing Cryo feels like you're playing this extremely brutal, punishing, cruel, competitive shooter, and at the same time, trying to solve a missed puzzle. It's like trying to do complicated math while you're in a knife fight. It's like both of those things together, which really, I think, make it special.
- [34:03]
Rob Zachny
It's like chess boxing.
- [34:04]
Patrick
Yeah, exactly. And I guess now to get to the confessional part of it, I've thought about this a lot. And if I really try to tear everything away and get down to the feeling that makes me come back to the game, like, what am I getting out of this? Like, when I log in every night, it makes me feel a certain way. And, like, what is that feeling and what am I getting out of it?
- [34:37]
Rob Zachny
And it's pretty ugly.
- [34:39]
Patrick
Like, you play a Call of Duty or you play a battlefield. You get in there, you do some cool stuff, you get some points. It's pretty lightweight. Maybe you're playing with friends, you're having a good time. I love that stuff. It's all good. With Marathon, the game is set up like there's this very carefully constructed economy that they're constantly tweaking. But the joy of it is just as much about taking stuff from people as it is about getting the stuff right. It's not like you're doing a World of Warcraft raid and something drops from an npc and then maybe you have to decide who gets it. It's like we went into cryo. We came in there with blue shields, and we ran into a team with gold shields, and they had extremely expensive gear that took them a long time to get. It's like they wore their best outfit out for their night out. And I came in from behind and knifed them in the back, and I took it from them. I. I ruin their day. And that is like the joy of the game. And it seems built in. Like, that's part of Tarkov as well. It's like this rags to riches dynamic. I came in with nothing. I saw a bigger fish. I ruined their lives. Now I'm the winner, and then most of the time, somebody else is doing that to you. Right. But it's like, it is an inherently, like, a very cruel dynamic, more than any other game type of game that I can think of. I don't know, it seems to be feeding, like, on a pretty dark human emotion.
- [36:25]
Rob Zachny
It is. And I think that's sort of inherent to the genre. But I also do think Marathon is one of the softer ones of these. I played Tarkov. Tarkov is basically like, what if we made a Game out of Hob's state of nature. There is no pro social element in Tarkov. It is entirely like you are being lowered into this most dangerous game scenario and the only thing to do with other players is mow them down. That's kind of it. I played a fair bit of hunt showdown and that has a little more going on. You can definitely get out with a lot of loot and you don't necessarily have to go fight other players, but really you do. There's not a ton of other stuff to do. You're kind of a shmuck of even fighting the zombies on those maps. Really the source of treasure on the map is the other players. And you're kind of using map dynamics to lure them into scenarios where you can get them Marathon. And this is a bit more where I play it. And I think this is partly because you are usually with a full team of three. I am often playing alone or with one other person and sometimes with three. And the game becomes a very different game based on those experiences. And actually I think in some ways you are kind of talking almost about two or three different constructions of marathon, which I think is another reason why it's so comprehensive, compelling. When you were playing it solo, it is closer to a game I got into a while ago was the hunter. It was a deer hunting sim made I think in the crisis Engine, the cryengine. But when it first came out, it was just this hauntingly gorgeous simulation of outdoor space and then really realistic hunting dynamics. You spent most of your times wandering around following deer trails, looking for their scat, things like that. And then a 40 minute play session might build to a single rifle shot across a meadow to see if your hunt went well or not. Marathon as a solo experience can be almost that where it is. I know I'm on a map with other players alone. We're all lone wolves. Some people are out there actively trying to hunt other players. Some are just trying to get out with loot. Some are more opportunistic. But you're out there always listening and thinking about what are other people trying to do. Is it kind of weird that I haven't heard anyone on this side of the map all matched? That probably means there's a stalker out there. The map couldn't have started if someone wasn't here. So if it's been quiet, that means someone's being quiet for a reason. That means that means bad things. And so there's parts of this that it feels really good when you mow someone down. You Take all their stuff. But there's also versions of the game where it is you have everything but the gun battle. You sort of like, you know, read the situation. You're staring at the team through your gun sights and you're thinking about. You're discussing with your friends, like, do we want to take this fight or not? Let's see what they do. And you let them go because you just didn't want to pull the lever and see what the slot machine spits out on that encounter. And so I think in some ways, what is like Marathon gives you a lot of ways to have what feels like a really good triumphant run without ruining anyone's day. But there's always the risk that someone's going to try to ruin yours, and there's always the incentive to maybe try and ruin someone else's. And I think that is part of what makes it so arresting, is that so many games, and I think this sort of put the more positive spin on sort of what you're saying. So many games are designed to just give you reward, stimuli. That's it. You log in and you can feel the degree to which you're being treated like a rat in a Skinner box, right? Where anything you do, the game gives you feedback. Hey, great job. Look at all this loot. Look at all this treasure you got. Are you having a good time? Let's move on to the next thing. And it can feel almost cloying because these things are tuned to constantly give you those rewards and that positive feedback and that affirmation. And you're sort of sitting there being like, I haven't done very much. This has actually been incredibly untaxing and increasingly uninteresting. I haven't. I haven't done anything that makes any of this feel special. I'm getting. You can sort of. I open a treasure chest, there's a loot table with odds that is populated behind them. That's all that's happening. But I am not doing anything that requires attention, skill, judgment, perception. None of that is really being engaged. The Extraction shooter, to get the most out of it demands all of that from you. And so the stakes feel more real. So do the victories. Whether or not those victories are at the expense of another player or not, just surviving on these matches and extracting with all your loot requires a degree of deliberation and knowledge and focus that so few other games expect or demand. And I think that way more than you're out there wrecking someone's day or taking their stuff, that feeling of I am fully engaged with this task. If I want anything out of this, I have to be standing on my head for the next 25 minutes. That is the addiction.
- [42:32]
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- [44:10]
Joseph Cox
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- [47:37]
Patrick
So we spent I think 30 minutes now explaining why we think this game is so good and so special. I'm going to look over at my second monitor now. I'm looking at Steam Charts, which is a website that tracks player numbers. I have to give the obvious caveat that it's like the tracking here is imprecise. People are playing on other platforms. The tracking on Steam itself is not precise. Really when you're looking at Steam Charts, you're comparing it to other numbers on Steam Charts. It doesn't tell the whole story. All that being said, according to steam charts, there's 3600 people playing the game right now. The peak in the past 24 hours, meaning the most number of people who have been on at any given point in the last 24 hours is almost 8,000. And the all time peak in the past four months is 88,000. Is marathon a dead game when you see those numbers? Given the size of Bungie as a studio, its pedigree, the investment that PlayStation has made in the studio, how do you gauge the success as an outsider of this game, as a business?
- [48:57]
Rob Zachny
That is hard because so much of this is opaque. But these are not the numbers you want to see from a new game, from a studio of Bungie stature, especially in the context of again the 3.6, 3.7 billion that Sony paid for it. However, it is an odd thing because I think the people who are playing it are having a very, very good time. It has not hit. There are moments where games are so dead that it becomes kind of non viable as a game. And I think we'll get to some of the reasons why that is. But basically as casual players fall away, you have a game increasingly dominated by very serious hardcore players, which becomes sort of its own death spiral. That now the game is demanding way too much even of people who are focused on it and it ceases to be fun for even moderate sickos. And then sort of the hardest of hardcore sort of consume what is left. But you need a healthy ecosystem of new players trying it out, casual people coming in that can be matched in the games with each other and have it feel appropriately balanced to where they're at in the game. And Marathon is sort of at the lower bound of what is viable for a game to maintain those dynamics. And I think what's concerning at this stage is there's nothing indicating there's a positive trend, that it still has a shallow downward curve. And a shallow downward curve is good, right? There are games that they fall off the cliff and they are truly dead, that they haven't been able to Arrest that. A shallow downward curve is just sort of a typical pattern that suggests that people are not falling away very quickly or easily. And if you do something different, you could possibly create an upward trajectory in that curve. But you are starting from a place that is, well, well short of where you want it to be. And that's going to make it tricky because that determines future resources. Is Marathon a game that Bungie will be allowed to continue investing in, given where it's at? Or will the directive from their owners at Sony be, this is a miss? You guys need to figure out something else to do because this is not a game that has any, even a successful version of this, where we get the curve sloping up and we grow this audience where we are starting from, the reasonable expectations of success from here are just not in line with what we need and demand. And so that could leave the game in a very, very dire place. However, these are all tricky things to assess because launching games, especially live service games like this, has gotten so much harder in the last like 10 or 15 years. It is hard now to build a strong brand and identity that resonates with people and they're aware of. And so it is very easy to imagine a scenario where you sort of look at a game like this and it's not doing anywhere near what we hoped. But if you look at the top, hell, even past the top 25 of games on Steam, you're looking at games that have been around for a long time. Like you are up against so many games that are basically lifestyles in and of themselves. You were never going to crack into that tier because they already have this huge audience in some ways. This game of musical chairs that was played and won over the last decade, now you're a late comer to it. And so now you're looking at, well, what is the trajectory a game like this can can go on from here? And you're sort of clawing your way towards a lot of other games in a similar zone, right? You're clawing your way towards newer games that are also struggling to find an audience. However, it doesn't help that with Marathon, Sony has points of comparisons like Helldivers. Like they did work on a game that blew up huge, unexpectedly huge for them, but that is a game that still has a lot of people playing it. Marathon could be viewed as a competitor to Arc Raiders. Arc Raiders has five, six, maybe more times as many players who are engaged with it. It is the more successful product. Is there a world where Sony can see Marathon clawing its Way into that tier where it is at least more successful relative to peer products. That is a question that is hard for me to answer. For me, I look at it as, this is a really, really good game. It doesn't. It's a lot to walk away from. The question then becomes, how can you make a version of Marathon that will speak to a wider audience? Have you left space here for you to do something else that can pull people in who are a little more casual and maybe a little less interested in the Extraction Shooter experience that we're talking about? There's a meme going around right now or story that I have no idea if it's an urban legend or not, but Marathon Steve, this character that hit Blue sky the other day, and I have no idea the degree to which this is sort of made up or embellished, but it's this idea of. I've got a buddy who played Marathon on Mac back in the day. He was excited. There's a new Marathon. He plays it and treats it as a first person shooter that's single player. And he goes in there and he shoots the robots. And that's all he does. He has not paid attention to any of the stuff that. That Bungie has designed there for the Extraction Shooter. I think people are sort of riveted by that because it's like Marathon is such an obscure game where it's full of all the nonsense. The Extraction Shooters are chock full of worrying about loadouts, the specifics of what equipment you attach to other equipment, loot tables, all these things. The notion that somebody could just bypass all of that and still have a good time is kind of marvelous. But I also think that story's got some legs because people are thinking about there is like Marathon Steve stands in for a type of player that's very different from your typical Extraction Shooter, where they kind of just want to have a good time in a cool world and they're happy to play a Bungie game like it's Halo, like it's the original Marathon, and whether or not the story is true. You can sort of imagine people at Bungie and Sony trying to figure out. We would be well served to find something to offer the Marathon Steves of the world that can then maybe open a gateway into other parts of Marathon for them. But there's an unsatisfied appetite for things that are not the Extraction Shooter but are things to do in a Bungie world. In this world even. They're not sort of what we conceived as the very hardcore serious gameplay Loop.
- [56:44]
Patrick
Yeah. And you get the sense that they are experimenting with pushing the game in that direction. They announced some modes that separate if players wish themselves from the psychos like me who are just looking to get in there and cause pain, we play one of them.
- [57:06]
Rob Zachny
And we had low key one of my favorite Days of Destiny because it was one of the few times where it was you, me and Matthew Gault. We don't talk about stuff during most marathon games because you're so on mission. And we were having a rough morning and we were doing quests that kept feeding us into the path of other players and getting us killed. And so we went and we played the was called the PvE Player vs Enemies mode. And two things happened there. One was that we were able to shoot the shit in a way we almost never get to in marathon because every bit of communication is shots at 225, shots at 2:25. What are we doing? It's all very like clipped, focused communication. It's all very stressful. Here we are just, you know, so where do you guys buy your DVDs? Those sorts of conversations. The other part of it was before we finished that map, we ended up in a huge gun battle with one of the boss type enemies that sort of seeded into the game as sort of a gold shield giant robot that pulls in in MMO par once, like adds continues adding additional robots to keep fighting you. And that was a huge knockdown drag out shootout. This thing had so many hit points and there were so many ads that we were sort of burning through all our weapon stocks. I was running around the map picking up like, you know, half loaded rifles to shoot a few more rounds and then trying to find where I could find more stuff to shoot these guys with. That was a blast. And it did remind me that like, oh, underneath all this stuff, Marathon is a bungee gang. And this was like a playing Halo on heroic scale encounter in a fireteam where it was like, wow, that was pretty intense and bracing. Other players weren't involved at all, but Bungie can still create these really compelling interactions between enemy types behavior and really thoughtfully designed encounter spaces on a map.
- [59:16]
Patrick
Tell me what you think about this comparison in terms of how I think about marathon financially or as a business. I am thinking about the movie Moneyball and in that movie, Brad Pitt the hero is sitting in a room with a bunch of old timey baseball scouts and they're trying to convince him that this player or that player has it right. It's just like, I just like how he Looks, I like how he throws the ball. There's something about his swing. I can't explain it. You got to feel it. I know it in my bones. And Brad Pitt again, the hero of the movie is like, you're full of shit. The numbers don't line up. Here's the spreadsheet. We have to listen to the data and just be very calculated and clinical about how we run this team. And like, in this comparison, when I think about Marathon, I find myself to be more like the old scouts where just like I look at this game and I'm like, look, I know the numbers don't look good. I know the spreadsheet looks bad, but there's something here. You know, have faith. Just like close your eyes and like, let's bet on this kid. Let's bet on this kid marathon and keep pouring money into it and something good will happen. I can't explain it, but I feel it. And I think there are. You can look into the past. I guess it's like maybe so far in the past now that it's no longer relevant because the industry has changed. But I think about Ubisoft was, I think especially good at this where they launched a game called Rainbow Siege 6, which was also, by the way, very dense and complicated, demanding game. And it kind of launched and it was like, okay, they launched a Rainbow six, whatever, they made another one of those. It wasn't a big hit, but they kept at it. And then it's like you look up one day and it's just like this huge, massive cash cow with a huge dedicated following. And I think not as big of a business, but even like more shockingly a success is a game they made called For Honor, which is like this weird melee multiplayer game when you're playing it as knights and other like old timey warriors. And it looks like a complete throwaway. How is this possibly going to make it? But they keep at it, they keep adding stuff to the game, they develop a community and suddenly it's making money. And I think both of those games are maybe fading now, but it was definitely worth the investment in the long haul. And I guess it's impossible to say, right? It's like this is all backseat studio management. I have no idea. I don't know. I have done some consulting for video games years ago, but it's like I have no idea how to run a huge business like PlayStation. But it seems like if you build it, they will come kind of situation if they just put there's good bones here. They keep Pouring money into it. They go all in on Marathon. Do you think it's something that with time, they can make it happen?
- [62:51]
Rob Zachny
I think they could. I think it's difficult to justify doing that just given where it is at. The immediate counter argument with things like Rainbow six Sieges, this came out in a completely different environment. And this is maybe where we're getting into now. The issues further afield from. For Marathon, if you want to start pivoting toward that. But one of the real issues in games right now is that there are so many games that have effectively become lifestyle games that it's as if the number of players in the world that are a potential audience for your new game. It's as if that audience has actually shrunk. It's as if there are fewer people playing video games right now than there were 15 years ago, because people have their game or their two or three games that they're playing constantly. It's the games that you find littering the top 25 or even the top 50 games on Steam charts. So when Rainbow Six Siege came out, this problem wasn't quite so acute. And so there was more. There's more optimism for working your way into people's habits to sort of become an alternative to Counter Strike in a way that would resonate with people. I think now it is so much harder to build an audience that you would find a lot of concern about saying, well, if we just keep plugging away at this, we could be the next Rainbow six Siege. It's just too different environment to have a lot of confidence in that. I think you'd also argue that Rainbow six Siege in some ways lent itself to slowly winning over its audience because it is so similar to a thing like Counter Strike. But it's Counter Strike with a lot of cool character classes. It was a game that didn't necessarily lend itself to this feeling of you can put a bunch of time into it and come away with nothing. A lot of the negative experiences that sometimes people associate with Extraction shooters. But the big thing is where the numbers are at right now. The game might be barely viable, and it wouldn't take much to tip Marathon into sort of a fatal death spiral. And it will take it a lot to build it toward that upward trajectory. However, to argue against myself there a little bit, it is a different environment than it was when Siege came out. Everyone is having this problem. Sony has had this problem. They already had a game, Concord, come out, like last year, two years ago. I forget what it is, but that game was basically canceled. Within weeks of launch.
- [65:47]
Patrick
I want you to get into this, but I want to set it up a little bit. You said something on the remap podcast a few weeks ago that sent a chill down my spine. I don't remember if it's your original quote or you were quoting someone else, but you sort of posited that video games as we know them, at the end of the day, might end up being a millennial phenomenon. Is this kind of what you're speaking of?
- [66:18]
Rob Zachny
I think that might be. Rob Zachney, Original.
- [66:21]
Patrick
I love it.
- [66:22]
Rob Zachny
This has been. This has been a suspicion. Now, this is not an entirely original thought, but the way I put it together is there's a lot of evidence that our generation is the only one that has this exact relationship to games. We grew up. When we were little kids, the Nintendo, the Nintendo Famicom came out and brought a certain type of video game into the home. And then across our lives, more consoles come out and make hardware gains. And they keep bringing these sorts of games to us. And both on PC and on consoles, they increasingly sort of target us now using the shared understanding of what these games are, the shared language, the games get more involved. And so. And you have all these games that are sort of built on this sort of foundation of games we have grown up on and playing for the last 30, 40 years. After us, the next generation, their playing habits are completely different. Now, my comment has always been a bit joking, but kind of not really. My parents bought me video games and they bought a console so that I really wanted a console. And that was kind of like, for me, among my friends with kids, the thing I observed was mom and dad didn't put the controller down, that they continued to play their video games. After the kids went to bed, the kids were given hand me down phones or cheap laptops to go like, you can also play video games. Not these video games. I'm going to be on the gaming rig or I'm going to be on the360 or the PlayStation 4. You can go play with this. I don't know. It's an old pixel just there. Here's an iPhone that I haven't used in five years. Yep, it turns on. Go have a ball, kid. And those kids were. They sort of became mobile gamers first, but they were also left at the mercy of things like Roblox. Not just Roblox, but that's one of the big ones. They really got into Fortnite, things that could run on any kind of hardware. And so their playing patterns became profoundly Different. They sort of embraced these big platform games and that's just kind of all. They play with their friends and they don't have. They're not sitting around looking for, man, I can't wait until we get the next Zelda. A lot of people among the Zoomers or Gen Alpha didn't quite develop that same relationship. And they're not going to have the same onboarding process because they're not going to have their gaming habit develop in lockstep with gaming technology and online infrastructure like we did. And so, yes, there is a type of gamer that we are, that might be a historically contingent phenomena based on accidents of like when we were born, technology available at the time, and how new technology was rolled out to us across our lives in a way that is not going to be replicated with other gamers, other generations. And we've already seen indications that, that their habits are profoundly different than ours ever were. And that seems unlikely to change as they get older. It seems unlikely that as you have these people entering into their 20s and 30s, they're going to wake up and say, I really need to play Last of Us. I'm really excited about the new AAA narrative experience from Sony.
- [70:18]
Patrick
Yeah. I think a defining feature of that experience is that you are on a trajectory. You get a Nintendo, it's 8 bit, then it's 16 bit, then it's 3D, then the 3D gets better. It's like it feels like we're on this journey and this very fast path forward. And part of the disconnect, I think for me is that in many ways Marathon feels like, yes, this is the logical next step. This feels like the new thing. It is complicating and tweaking and iterating and all this stuff that came before it is really taking advantage of the fact that I have all this built up knowledge over many years about what a game like this can be. And it actually requires it, as we've discussed.
- [71:12]
Rob Zachny
Right.
- [71:13]
Patrick
Like it requires, requires a great deal of expertise. And I'm sort of like looking behind me like, hey guys, let's all come to this next. What is the logical next good experience in this art form? And then you look back and you realize that the generations behind you are not on this journey. Right. It's like they have a completely different foundation, which, I mean, I think lends a lot of credence to this theory that this art form is not going to take the path that we have that millennials have been on. It's taking a different path. And I don't think it's a bad path, but it's very different. And a lot of the pain that we see in the industry right now in the form of layoffs and reductions and consolidation is. It's not entirely a result of this. There's a lot of factors, macroeconomic factors that make this happen. But I do think that this is a readjustment for audience, right? It's like the millennial type of player is not replenishing. There's a new type of player that's coming up behind it. And this huge multi billion dollar industry is struggling to adjust to that reality. And that's how you get one of the most respected game studios and one of the biggest game companies. They get their heads together and they're
- [72:40]
Rob Zachny
like, what are we going to do
- [72:41]
Patrick
that's going to get people really excited? And then as we've said, it's not an airball, right? It's like it's not a complete miss, but it's just like it's not cutting it. It's just like it's not cutting it. And then I was looking, I was actually. There's an excellent newsletter from Simon Carless and he was talking about Mecha Chameleon or something like that. It's like a game that a team of two people made. You go into this match, you kind of try to. It's like a hide and seek game, essentially. It sold like 10 million copies. They made $50 million in a day. And that's not as much money as marathon made. But like the ROI is incredible, you know what I mean? And you look at this and you look at that and you're like, okay, it's like the times are changing. It's like it's happening. And again, not against it. I'm not going to sit here and like shake my fist at the cloud. But it is kind of haunting to see, you know, this hobby, this thing that is kind of life defining for you change so clearly not so quickly because it's been happening for a while. But you're like, wow, it's like it's happening. We're like aging out, which is a very, very strange experience. I guess one last thing is if you look at the marathon subreddit, if you just are in any type of space where people talk about competitive shooters, something that's come up in the past few years is the idea, the concept of sweats, which means you've alluded to this, these are players that are essentially better than you. They're trying more than you. They're trying so hard, they're sweating and you don't have the time or the skill to compete with them. Obviously there's always been people who are better than you in online games. But I feel like the complaint and as like an existential issue is pretty new. Do you agree with that? And if so like, why do you think that is? Why is this like the idea of sweats a new thing?
- [74:40]
Rob Zachny
Is it new? I guess it's new. Ish. So I think the problem is a lot of times when back when games are predominantly single player and then you start having people play multiplayer, but maybe it's mostly local multiplayer, like people playing goldeneye or Halo on a shared screen, people come away from that being like, I'm pretty good at video games, I'm pretty good at this, I'm solid at playing shooters. And then the second you connected people to the Internet and you had ranked matchmaking become available, people rapidly learn as they're not right. They're deeply average, maybe below average. And their experience of playing these things multiplayer goes from yeah, I win like I win half the time or more than half the time, it's great. And it becomes experience of I lose constantly. And I feel like there's studies on this that a 5050 win rate feels like you're losing all the time. So if you're appropriately math, you should be winning and losing about equally. That doesn't feel feel good. People don't want to do that. They want to win more than they lose. People perceive it as if they'll perceive 5050 as being like a 70, 30 split, games lost versus games won. So a lot of people have this unpleasant awakening of yeah, I'm just not that good at these games. But then you also have the phenomenon of in any sort of competitive game or multiplayer game, you have people who do take it very, very seriously and devote themselves to it. And it becomes a real problem, especially in team games where you'll have people getting frustrated if you play suboptimally well, how are you going to learn how to play the game if people are yelling at you from the minute you show up and you're trying to learn it, in some ways your hardcore audience becomes literally discouraging to new players. But then also you have the problem of the way sweats engage with games. The way they play them, they're trying to play them super efficiently, they're trying to get the most positive results, the most consistent results. And so they will also then play it in a really boring fashion. Optimal is rarely fun. This is true across sports. This is true across everything. Inefficiency is where a lot of the fun lies. That's the nature of you don't play efficiently. But people who are like, I really want to win a lot of matches or I want to get the most loot for my time in these games, they will not be playing it to have fun. The fun for them is outcome. And so then they will be trying to bend everything around outcome rather than process. And process is supposed to be where the fun lives. But your sweats and the influence they have on the game begins to drain the fun out of the process and becomes an outcome focused thing. And if you're a new player showing up to those spaces, it feels incredibly hostile. These people are much, much better than you. But then if you deal with them as teammates, most of them will not be fun to play with, even if they are nice and they're trying to teach you the game. What they are teaching you is not a particularly fun version of the game. Because Helldivers ran into this too where Helldivers when you started playing it.
- [77:59]
Patrick
Woo hoo.
- [78:00]
Rob Zachny
We're playing Starship Troopers, team shooter thing. Use these abilities. Look at all this goofy shit you can do to these aliens at this point. Some of the things I've heard from like higher level Helldivers right now is if you show up and you don't have like the optimal build of call down powers and weaponry, people will be angry because you're wasting their time. And that is a problem because this is supposed to be fun. People are supposed to be like, I think I want to do this today. I want to use this. If you have people saying you are screwing me over by treating this like a toy and I'm telling you that we need to take this seriously and play it this way, the people who are in it for fun are going to walk away. They're not going to want to play against these people and they're not going to play with them. And then that sort of hardcore audience will begin to consume itself. And I think a lot of developers, where they especially lose, lose sight of the issue is they will start listening to their community. With the community is increasingly dominated by loud voices coming from the hardest core players who want very different things than what the sorts of more casual, more fun and exploration focused players will want from their game. And so you end up in a trap of your dedicated audience. The people that are keeping this game afloat are maybe also the people who are going to keep it from ever growing and your Dedicated audience are making all these demands and pushing you develop it in this direction. But you might be locally optimizing for the sickos who this is their one thing they want to play. And to get the tens of thousands of other players you need for this to become a viable business, you're going to have to make it a different game. You're going to have to make the people very angry. But in the process, they will try to burn down the community around you. So I think there's kind of two issues there. There's the sweats and the hardcore players as they exist in the match, and then there's kind of the influence they exert as a community management problem and business development problem.
- [80:08]
Patrick
Yeah, I mean, I think that nails it from a purely selfish perspective. I hope it does well, because I really enjoy the game.
- [80:16]
Rob Zachny
Do we want to talk about where this stands with Bungie right now?
- [80:19]
Patrick
Like in terms of what is happening at Bungie?
- [80:22]
Rob Zachny
Yeah, yeah.
- [80:23]
Patrick
I mean, sure, let's get into it. I mean, it's not nice. It's not good news. We've just had a terrible week of layoffs, if you want to get into that.
- [80:32]
Rob Zachny
Well, it's interesting, I think. So what has also happened, I think this has also increased the sort of stench of failure around Marathon is that Marathon comes out and then Bungie starts firing tons of people. And you could say that's the verdict on Marathon. Right. If Marathon was the success Bungie needed, they wouldn't be hemorrhaging jobs right and left. And that's true up to a point, but the story's more complicated than that. And in some ways, when we're talking about the different environments things exist in, I think Bungie might be a studio that typifies how hard things have gotten out there. What has happened in the last week is Sony made the decision to effectively lay off the entire Destiny 2 team after Bungie released the Final Shape, which was the final big expansion to Destiny. They were very clear that that main story of Destiny 2, that had been the story of Destiny since the game launched in 2014. That was over. But Destiny wasn't going away. It just wasn't making a lot of new Destiny stuff like the Final Shape or the Taken King or any of those things. And the game began to die off. And Bungie and Sony looked at the situation and sort of reached the conclusion that it was no longer worth continuing to support Destiny as a major ongoing concern. And then they fired 200. And I want to say 220 might have been almost 300 people as they let them go. But effectively a lot of Bungie veterans and basically the entire Destiny 2 team were let go. However, for me, I think Marathon, even the decision to make it is driven by the fact that Bungie were already staring down the barrel of a really challenging environment. Made perhaps more challenging by the fact that Sony had spent all this money to acquire Bungie as part of its former CEOs push toward live service games.
- [82:49]
Patrick
But
- [82:52]
Rob Zachny
think about this. Bungie back when they made Marathon. Marathon, I think is like 93, 94. They become independent from Microsoft in 2007. I remember there's this big. They had a big town hall and Microsoft Studios games. If you remember from that time era of an Xbox, if it was like a first party game, you'd have the Microsoft Game Studios logo that comes up. And I want to say at this town hall, they had that familiar Bungie logo comes up, a Microsoft Games studio comes up and then that dissolves and it's like an independent studio and the Bungie town hall goes wild and all this. Jason Schreier writes a little bit about this moment in Blood, Sweat and Pixels on this chapter about Bungie and Microsoft execs being like, damn, were we that bad? Why are you guys so happy? But the important thing to remember is, let's say 1994 to like 2007, Bungie makes Marathon, Marathon 2, Myth, Myth 2, Soulblighter, the entire Halo trilogy. They have inked a deal to make halo reach an ODST. All of that is done between like the mid-90s and 2007. 2007, they're newly independent. What are we gonna do? What are we gonna do with all this independence? We don't have Microsoft forcing us to just make Halos any more. What's our next big thing? And their answer to that ultimately turns out to be Destiny. Destiny starts taking shape across 2007, 2008. Serious development starts work around like 2010 or somewhere in there. Bungie's effectively had the chance to make one big bet after it became independent and they betted on Destiny. There's an argument to be made that certainly the studio shouldn't have been run in a way where they don't have any sort of parallel development meaningfully happening to make it so they're not just a Destiny studio. But however it panned out, every studio gets to make fewer bets now because games take longer to make and you're hitting a higher quality bar. And so Bungie, you have all these great games made in 10, 13 year span. From the 90s and the mid 2000s. Since 2007, they closed out their Halo involvement and then they made Destiny, Destiny 2, a whole bunch of expansions. But we're talking almost 20 years of that studio being consumed by Destiny. You do not get many chances to get things right in the industry anymore. You are steering Battleships and so the bet you make it can take 8, 10 years to see if you were even close to the right answer. And that makes long term planning scary. We usually like our little action consequence to be a little closer so we can see the impact of what we're doing. But you can say that Bungie made some key decisions about what we're going to be as a studio back in 2007. And they never got to really make a lot of improvements, important decisions. Again, they said we're going to do Destiny. And it's been 20 years of working on Destiny.
- [86:06]
Patrick
I think you don't mean it to sound this way, but I think the way you said it makes it sound like if it's a fact of life that they made these decisions, I think it was possible to make different decisions. The thing is that these decisions are so rooted in the moment that they're made. So it's like it's really hard to get back there mentally. But if they are making decisions about what they want to do next in 2007, they're making that in the shadow of World of Warcraft. And like, the way that the world looked like the way this industry looked in 2007 is like world of Warcraft is going to eat the entire business. And it's like, if we don't make a World of Warcraft now, if we don't start making it now, it's over. Because the way it looked like there was just going to be World of Warcraft and maybe one other game and then everything else would go away. And they made decisions, they're like, hey, how about we make a Halo World of Warcraft? And it's like that's what they made and like, and that's how it turned out. And I think unfortunately it's like, I understand that. Sorry. Just also, by the way, in terms of like thinking about decisions being rooted in time that they were made, like this $30.7 billion acquisition sounds so foolish now. You have to go back to when they made that acquisition. Money was free.
- [87:24]
Rob Zachny
It's like 3.6, 3.6.
- [87:27]
Patrick
It's like money was free back then. Like money wasn't money. It's like people were acquiring things as if like money didn't exist and then the economy changed and now you're like, oh no, we spend billions of dollars and we have to make it back. But I guess back to Simon Carlos's newsletter. It's like, if I'm looking at the industry now and I'm running a studio and here we go again being a backseat businessman. But I don't think that I would take my 300 person studio and make one big multi billion dollar ten year swing. I'd be like, go make 30 games and one of them will catch on. And then we can reiterate, I think, to what we were saying earlier. The idea that we just have to take these gigantic, you know, decade long projects on is like just now how it works. It's just like now how people are playing games.
- [88:26]
Rob Zachny
But it's terrifying math for everyone because you go take 30 swings with those resources. But that is not how Bungie is set up to operate. These big AAA studios they're specialized in. Again, like, you know, you're an art history guy as well. The analogy. In some ways, there's two analogies that I come back to a lot with video games, especially AAA ones, Cathedrals and opera. Cathedrals are generational construction projects where every element is in some ways calling for master craftsmen to come work on it. Opera comes into it because it's so multidisciplinary, right? There's acting, there's writing, there's, there's an orchestra, there's painting, there's dance, all these things. But video games are like, they're full. Making these things requires, especially at these studios, they're huge because they have huge numbers of specialized craftsmen that cannot easily turn. How about you guys just go and turn around? Tiny game. That's not how they're set up to operate. The other thing is, to your point, I am certain that Bungie probably did feel pressure in 2007 to speak to the trends they saw, which was we need to go and figure out how to make the Bungie equivalent of World of Warcraft. And I suspect when Jim Ryan greenlit acquiring Bungie, what he was looking at was, oh shit. Gaming habits are changing and players are just getting locked into things like Roblox, Fortnite, et cetera, and you never see them again. And so you better get cracking on making your own equivalent to that. This is why we need to go all in on live service games, because live service games are sort of devouring our audience. So we need to go all in on making some bets and seeing how we can get Some of the action that Epic has with Fortnite, what EA has with EA sports games, et cetera. But where I think executives come in for some just criticism here is, unfortunately, if you are helming a battleship, you can't trend chase. You're not agile enough. Oh, you identify the trend too late, you missed it. Bungie can't hit the gas and go chasing World of Warcraft. It's 2007. It's going to take too long. Oh, you missed out on the Fortnite moment. That moment has passed. You can't buy tons of studios and pivot Sony video games to live service. You kind of have to figure things out, but everyone is trying to. And we've worked at companies and we've seen how this works. You need stories to tell people about why you have a vision for success. And we're going to do the same thing, but we're going to do it well and do it better is not a story that inspires confidence. We worked in media during days when media was cratering right and left. There's a lot of things I can hold against vice and vice leadership, and it was a very silly company in a lot of ways. But the thing I've always had sympathy with is you couldn't go to investors and be like, we're going to run good journalistic stories, we're going to package them well and readers will show up. Yeah, everyone's trying that. They're getting their teeth kicked in because the business dynamics have completely changed. The revenue models have completely collapsed. So you need to come up with some sort of different story to tell people to keep the investments coming in. And that's also true at companies like, for a studio like Bungie, you have to have a story you're telling to get people to invest in your game and sell them on the pitch. For someone like Jim Ryan, who's overseeing Sony, you have to have a story you're telling to investors on public markets about what the vision is for the growth of Sony moving forward. Because the thing you're up against is, it sounds really good if you're saying, well, we released a game, it doubled its money. If you just sank a ton of money into an S&P 500 index fund, you will double your money in eight years, which is about how long it takes to make these games. Now, the notion that you have this pressure of these resources can be sent anywhere. They can be sent to other projects in the company. But also we are speaking to investors who have oodles and oodles of capital who can just literally throw that stuff in the equivalent of the stock market savings account and possibly outperform the greatest fruits of your craftsmanship and labor. And so you come up with more ambitious pitches and more compelling stories to try to convince these people that they should let their money ride with you and trust what you're heading towards. And you end up, in some ways, taking swings that maybe in retrospect seem ill advised. Maybe you look back and you're saying, well, destiny was a lot of fun and a lot of people really loved it. But given how things have panned out, was that really the direction that you should have gone? And there were people at Bungie who didn't think it should have. They purged out a lot of the people who didn't want to go in the Destiny direction. But also, it is entirely possible that it was kind of the Destiny direction or no direction, that there weren't going to be takers for a lot of other visions of what Bungie's next big project should be. And so they kind of had to pitch something that was like, we're going to mash together Halo and World of Warcraft and we're going to make infinite money forever. And they may have known that was gonna be hard, and they may have known that wasn't really realistic, but it was the song and dance you had to do to get people to trust that Bungie not just still had it, but were going to turn your investment into sort of a genre defining performance.
- [94:23]
Patrick
I think if I was a Bungie, the pitch that I would make, the story I would tell is not all that different than the story we try to tell. Advice, which is, we're making something really cool. Trust me, bro, trust me, it will work out. And just do that until you run out of Runway. That would be my advice.
- [94:48]
Rob Zachny
Well, I think, especially if I'm. The thing I would say if I was at a high level with these companies, is that the trends may not be good with Marathon, things may not be looking good with Bungie, but what are you going to do once you tear up these studios? What you've now done is you've destroyed institutional knowledge, you've destroyed capacity. You're not going to easily get those things back. And so you can do that. If you're running scared and you're saying the burn rate at the studio, how much it is costing to keep these people employed in Washington state, et cetera, you can panic and say, we can't afford to keep doing this. We need to start shedding all these people, and that's kind of the direction they're moving in. And maybe they'll do that to the Marathon team as well. But the argument really is that
- [95:37]
Patrick
you
- [95:38]
Rob Zachny
spent a lot of money to acquire an asset that could produce good games you missed on a bet. Probably a bet that was shaped by the constraints of having to maintain destiny in the background and sort of create a project that was a little more scoped. Like given a slightly smaller scope. It's a nice thing that distraction shooters are for. They take a very small amount of content and make it into a lot of games for people. But I look at it now, you can panic and just start keep lopping off limbs of the studio. But now that studio that you paid those billions of dollars for literally can do significantly less than it did. Now you can't even make bets with it. And so now you're panicking and you're sort of. It's not even like goodfellas burning down the restaurant because there you had insurance. That's not what's happening here. This isn't like the private equity stripping for parts. You paid a fortune for a thing that can make really high quality games of a certain type. And now you're kind of showing you don't have the stomach or the money to stay in on using those resources to go play other bets. And if you continue laying these people off, when you turn around like, well, what's Bungie's next pitch? It'll be even less compelling. And I think that is probably the argument for Marathon at this stage is look, it exists, it's good. We know how to make it. If you kill this game, what other new launch has really blown up huge for you? What other games in the space are really showing? This is how you launch one of these and be successful in 2026. The list is pretty short to non existent. And so in a weird way, I think the actual pitch is you're stuck in here with me. Right? That's kind of a weird one to use in the corporate context.
- [97:40]
Joseph Cox
But
- [97:42]
Rob Zachny
those are your choices. You can't continue cutting Bungie and killing these IPs that you've invested a lot of resources into and then think, well, we just need to free them up to come up with their next big idea. Their next big idea isn't going to be big and they won't be able to execute on it nearly as well because you just shot them in both feet and the kneecaps and you're somehow expecting them to come back with, well, I'm sure the next one will be a hit. So I think in some ways that is the real pitch. Emmanuel, whether or not it's the next Rainbow Six siege or not, it's what you got. You just publicly shot Destiny in the head. So now there's Marathon, and after Marathon, there's nothing. And if you do another round of layoffs at Bungie, Bungie's going to be a shadow of its former self. And so this is kind of the time where you probably need to start figuring out how to deploy the resources that you have, even if they are costing you money. Because the alternative is basically saying, well, we just spent $3.6 billion for nothing. And all the money we've invested in Marathon Destiny to date, all of that is a smoking ruin.
- [98:58]
Patrick
Okay, I think we'll leave that there. Please support REMAP Radio so you can listen to Rob and Patrick and Chia talk about this and much more every week, several times a week. Watch their streams, read their website. As a reminder, Four4Media is journalists founded and supported by subscribers. If you wish to subscribe to four four Media and directly support our work, please go to four Media Co. Another way to support us is by leaving a five star rating and review for the podcast. That stuff really helps us out. This has been four four media. We'll see you again next time.