The interesting thing about Fortnites growth isn't when it went from the Save the World Tower Defense game to Battle Royale...it's when Ninja and Drake played in it early March AFTER it became a cultural phenomenon.
Around that time, Epic announced a 3.4 million CCU record. Then at the end of that year, Epic announced an 8.3 million CCU record.
Then in 2020, and 2024, Fortnite reached new CCU records of 14 and 15 million.
The reason I bring this up is that it hurts the argument of "The market saw Marathon, judged it, and nobody wants it." The market saw Fortnite in early 2018, judged it, and then it grew 10x over the following 5 years based on the strengths of Live Service design.
I really do think online discussion of Marathon isn't representative of the actual matket. There's a big middle section of the bell curve that think Marathon looks decent.
Fortnite did a lot of business things right from how it integrated outside IP / celebrities and everything they did to target children to make it a billion dollar franchise post 2017, but that stuff kind of came after the pivot saved the game initially. The pivot alone wasn't responsible for all of the success, but I would argue Fortnite got incredibly lucky with it's timing due to that pivot. Just as these ARMA mods and PUBG were kicking off the Battle Royal craze, Fortnite was able to pivot itself into the first kind of cartoony / arcady non-military BR that felt smooth to play. PUBG and the ARMA mods always kind of felt like ass or were clunky because they were wrapped up in a bunch of mil-sim stuff. That certainly worked for a huge audience and PUBG got it's success too, but Fortnite was able to scoop up everyone else.
I just think it's a huge success story because that change in gameplay happened in like 1-2 months. They launched and weren't successful so they immediately made some radical decisions to great success. I wish I had more data to back this up but I remember hearing about Fortnite almost immediately after they made the pivot. It was hot before 2018 and only got hotter. I was able to find this tweet from Oct 2017 about Fortnite having 525k Peak CCU:
This was well before any of the multimedia stuff or celebrities and only a month after pivoting to a different genre.
Your assumption that Counter Strike grew in proportion with Steams rise is not accurate...
Not sure what the take away from the video is? It shows back in 2012 that CS, CSS, and CS:GO were all top performers and have been ever since? DOTA was king for a bit but CS is kind of timeless. For the first year or two CS:GO was a paid update and had to compete with Source but from mid 2015 onward it's growth looks pretty stable to me?
Like taking mid 2015 onward steam 4x it's CCU over that period and CS:GO/2 3x it's CCU over the same period but the trend is fairly linear. CS:GO is a little spikey as all games are but the trend seems consistent.
I think these games kind of prove you can take an OK cookie recipe, alter the recipe list by a few percentage points, and it can turn into a great cookie recipe.
That's not to say Marathon is guaranteed to do this, but I think it's foolish to pretend anyone really knows its future.
I agree there's a possible future where a competent agile team could save Marathon, it's certainly redeemable in that regard. I'm just a Bungie hater so I think they can't do it.
I'm not so quick to believe Bungie is "inefficient". It seems like that narrative was built around Destiny 2 (one of the most successful Live Service games ever) and people like to apply it to them making an Extraction Shooter. We'll see over the next 6 months or so how "slow" Bungie is.
I don't know how to reply to this other than kind of appealing to my experience and time as a Destiny player. I played D2 for 6 years from launch and racked up around 4000 hours. You really had to be there to see just how often Bungie fumbled the ball massively and what their version of success looked like. It's important to keep in mind that Destiny burned it's own audience. Millions of players said fuck this and walked away forever the minute they had an exit point. Happy players don't do that.
I still love the world and lore of Destiny. I love the IP, art, and music, but as a product it was often severely disappointing. I think Bungie has a bunch of talented artists and writers, but their gameplay designers, directors, programmers, scenario designers, and especially management can eat the fatest part of my ass. I'll give some props to the network engineering / ops teams but every other technical team on Destiny sucked. They got to copy paste the feel of Halo and rode on that success for years.
I don't like to label an entire studio based off what they did on another game. I don't do it when Nintendo releases Star Fox Zero or when Steph Curry goes 3 / 12 from 3. New games with new leadership should be judged on their own merit.
Marathon took 200-250 million dollars, 300+ staff, etc and launched pretty bare bones. That's kind of inline with what I expect from Bungie. You also have Justin "Never Over Deliver" Truman as the CEO now...
I don't think PlayStation will give Bungie a long leash. If S2 - S4 don't improve player numbers Marathon is in trouble. That said, Sony OKd another 100 devs for Marathon so they must see something.
I think Bungie has until S3-4 max to show dramatic change, after that Sony either cuts support entirely or cuts support to a level befitting a 10k CCU game and seasonal updates become bare bones.
Extraction is special because every map can be created to offer a unique experience. This is unlike a new map in Street Fighter VI or Overwatch which has to play largely the same as all the others.
Bungie can create maps with wildly different PvP, PvE, and Extraction rates. They can make puzzle oriented maps, or maps that encourage uneasy alliances.
Extraction is really just Roblox for hardcore PvP RPG gamers.
I don't see what makes extraction unique in this regard. With the right incentives any game can encourage player behaviour. There's a subgenre of fighting games called platform fighters (Like Smash Bros) where the stage design absolutely matters. Most fighting games just have flat stages because fighting game players usually prefer to limit outside influence for competitive integrity.
Like if I follow your logic here Fall Guys is the ultimate video game because every stage / map can be anything. There are races, survival games, memory games, capture the flag games, team games, etc. Most games just don't do this because it's chaotic and players don't tend to want 30 different experiences.
Here's Guilty Gear Strives CCU data...
I'll take Marathons chances at radically improving player numbers over that.
It's still a fighting game at the end of the day. 5k is healthy for a fighting game sadly, especially one that's 5 years old. I wasn't speaking about success, only that you can radically shake up the design and feel of a fighting game with a few tweaks.
We're not too far off here. I feel ARC Raiders has the better foundation but Embark moves slow and there's has no endgame. Marathon S1 was definitely too sweaty but I suspect that'll improve substantially over the next 6 - 12 months.
I would trust Embark 1000x more than Bungie. Embark is mostly made up of the very best of DICE, the guys who gave us the technical masterpieces that were Battlefield BC2, 3, 4, 1, 5. Those guys are some of the most technically proficient devs in the industry and I still find The Finals insanely impressive compared to the pile of dog shit Battlefield 2042 became. Arc Raiders was also made for like 1/3rd the money of Marathon, which alone makes them better on the business front.
