On March 5, 2026, Bungie released Marathon. A $40 extraction shooter built on the bones of a beloved 1994 Mac franchise, backed by Sony's chequebook, and launched into a market that has spent the last two years systematically rejecting everything it represents. It peaked at 88,000 concurrent players on Steam. The free Server Slam the week before had drawn over 143,000. The moment people had to pay, nearly 40 percent walked away.

Bungie asked media outlets to hold their reviews. Metacritic sat blank on launch day. And somewhere in Sony's headquarters, someone quietly updated a spreadsheet that should by now be triggering serious questions at board level.

But this piece is not really about Marathon. Marathon is just the latest entry in what has become the most expensive graveyard in entertainment history. A graveyard filled with live-service games that cost hundreds of millions to build, launched to dwindling audiences, and left thousands of talented people without jobs.

The scale of what has happened is difficult to comprehend.

An estimated 45,000 jobs have been lost across the video game industry between 2022 and mid-2025. Not natural turnover. Not voluntary departures. Layoffs. Studio closures. Entire teams dissolved overnight because the games they spent years building could not find or keep an audience.

In 2024 alone, over 14,600 jobs were cut across nearly 160 companies. The first quarter of that year saw 8,619 roles eliminated, the highest quarterly total in the history of the industry. By 2026, the GDC’s State of the Industry report found that one in three US game developers had been laid off in the preceding two years. Half of all respondents said their current employer had conducted layoffs in the past 12 months.

These are not abstract figures. Every one of those numbers is a person. A developer, a designer, a QA tester, an artist, a producer. Someone who chose this industry because they loved making games, who spent years honing a craft, and who was told to clear their desk because a boardroom decided that chasing Fortnite’s revenue model was a safer bet than making something players actually wanted.

The pitch was seductive. Build a game once, update it forever, monetise it continuously. Fortnite proved the model could generate billions. Destiny showed it could sustain a dedicated audience for years. GTA Online became a money printer. Every publisher in the industry looked at those outliers and decided that was the baseline expectation.

It was not.

What followed was a gold rush into live-service development that ignored a fundamental reality: the model only works for a handful of games at the top, and the audience for always-online, constantly-updating multiplayer experiences is not infinite. Players do not have unlimited time. They do not have unlimited money. And they certainly do not have unlimited patience for half-baked launches sold on the promise that the game will get better in six months.

The casualties piled up fast. Concord lasted two weeks before Sony pulled it offline and shuttered Firewalk Studios entirely. 172 people lost their jobs. Reports put the development cost at around $200 million before acquisition costs, with some estimates reaching $400 million, for a game that peaked below 700 concurrent players on Steam.

XDefiant hit a million players in two hours, then bled out over seven months before Ubisoft announced the shutdown. The closure of Ubisoft's San Francisco and Osaka studios impacted nearly 277 employees. The game will cease to exist entirely in June 2025. Every hour of work, every asset created, every line of code: gone forever. No offline mode. No preservation. Just a dead URL and a refund policy.

Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League took one of the most iconic villain rosters in comics, handed it to Rocksteady (the studio behind the Arkham trilogy), and turned it into a generic live-service looter. Support ended less than a year after launch.

Hyenas was cancelled before it even shipped. Sega pulled the plug after testing suggested the market could not support another extraction shooter. That decision, painful as it was, might have been the smartest call any publisher made in this entire cycle.

Anthem. Babylon's Fall. Rumbleverse. Knockout City. Destruction AllStars. MultiVersus. The list goes on. Billions of dollars in combined development costs. Thousands of careers disrupted. And the games themselves, many of which were genuinely well-crafted, simply cease to exist once the servers go dark. You cannot even play them if you wanted to.

What stands out most about the way this story gets told is how quickly the conversation moves past the people. The headlines focus on the games. The business press focuses on the stock price. The gaming press focuses on player counts and Metacritic scores. But behind every shuttered studio is a team that spent years of their lives building something they believed in, only to watch it get killed in weeks.

When Firewalk closed, 172 developers were given the corporate platitude of “we will try to find placement within our global community of studios.” When Sony laid off 17 percent of Bungie’s workforce in 2024, those were Destiny veterans, people who had shipped some of the most played games of the last decade. When Ubisoft killed XDefiant, 277 people across two studios were impacted. The GDC survey found that nearly half of laid-off games workers reported significant difficulty finding new employment. The industry shed 45,000 roles in three years. Where exactly are all these people supposed to go?

And the people who made the strategy are not the ones clearing their desks.

Which brings us back to Bungie. Marathon is not Concord. The gunplay is reportedly excellent. The art direction is distinctive. The voice cast is strong. Early Steam reviews trend positive. It is, by most accounts, a competent and sometimes impressive game.

But competent does not matter when the question is wrong.

Marathon is a $40 extraction shooter launching into a genre that has been cooling since 2024, from a studio that lost 17 percent of its workforce the year before, backed by a publisher that just watched hundreds of millions evaporate with Concord. It features mandatory quarterly progress wipes that reset all player gear, levels, and faction standing. It has no single-player campaign. It is competing directly with Arc Raiders, which sold 2.5 million copies in its debut week by being accessible and relatively frictionless.

And it is not just wearing the name of one franchise that meant something. It is cannibalising three.

The original Marathon trilogy, released between 1994 and 1996, was a landmark in game design. It pioneered ambient storytelling through in-game terminals, years before anyone used the phrase “environmental narrative.” It featured AI characters with distinct personalities and competing agendas. It explored themes of consciousness, rampancy, and cosmic scale that Bungie would later refine in Halo. It was atmospheric, cerebral, and deeply weird in the best possible way. For a generation of Mac gamers, Marathon was the reason they took first-person shooters seriously as a storytelling medium.

Turning that legacy into a competitive loot-and-extract multiplayer game is not a revival. It is a rebrand. Strip the Marathon name away and you have a solid extraction shooter that could have been called anything.

But Marathon is not the only Bungie legacy being hollowed out here.

In 2001, Bungie West released ONI, a third-person action game that blended gunplay with hand-to-hand combat in a cyberpunk world directly inspired by Ghost in the Shell and Akira. It won E3’s Game Critics Award for Best Action/Adventure in 1999. It was ambitious, genre-blending, and unlike anything else on the market. It was also the only game Bungie West ever made. When Microsoft acquired Bungie, the ONI IP was transferred to Take-Two Interactive. Bungie does not own it anymore.

And yet, in the 2026 Marathon, one of the key in-game entities is called “ONI.” Not a reference to the game. Not a tribute. It is a backronym: Onboard Navigation Intelligence. It is the AI navigation assistant built into every player’s Runner Shell by the CyberAcme corporation, giving you waypoints and assigning contracts. The game that was once its own creative vision, Bungie West’s sole contribution to gaming history, has been reduced to the voice in your ear telling you where to go. Your in-game GPS.

The irony gets sharper when you look at the new Marathon’s stated art influences. The development team cited Ghost in the Shell, Akira, and Aeon Flux as core inspirations for the game’s visual identity. Those are the exact same influences that defined ONI 25 years ago. Bungie is drawing from the same creative well that ONI drew from, but without acknowledging ONI itself as part of that lineage.

This is what happens when IP becomes a branding exercise rather than a creative commitment. You do not revive the thing that made the name meaningful. You just stick the name on whatever the market research says you should be building this quarter.

Sony’s own PlayStation chief described Marathon’s early reception as “varied.” That is a word that does a lot of heavy lifting when you have got sub-100K players on launch day and a blank review page.

The industry already has the evidence for what works. Helldivers 2 launched to massive success by being a focused, cooperative, fun experience with a clear identity. Baldur’s Gate 3 became a cultural event by being an uncompromising single-player RPG. Elden Ring sold 25 million copies by trusting players with a challenging, non-live-service open world. The best-performing games of the last three years have overwhelmingly been titles that knew exactly what they were and did not try to be a platform.

Players are not rejecting multiplayer. They are rejecting the cynicism of the live-service model as it has been implemented by most publishers. The constant battlepasses. The FOMO-driven seasonal content. The feeling that you are not playing a game but servicing a subscription. The knowledge that everything you earn might be wiped, sunset, or shut down entirely at the publisher’s discretion.

And they are definitely rejecting the premium price tag for the privilege. Marathon at $40 in a genre where the most successful recent entry was essentially free-to-try. Concord at $40 in a market where Overwatch went free-to-play years ago. The pricing alone reveals how disconnected these decisions are from what players are actually telling the market with their wallets.

The live-service era will not be remembered fondly. It will be remembered as the period when the games industry lost its way, chasing recurring revenue at the expense of creative ambition, player trust, and tens of thousands of careers.

Studios need to stop building $200 to $400 million games aimed at niche audiences. A hardcore extraction shooter is not a mass-market product. A hero shooter entering a market dominated by Overwatch and Apex Legends is not a safe bet. A live-service game that requires years of post-launch investment to reach its potential is not a viable business plan when your publisher will pull the plug in two weeks if the numbers do not hit.

More importantly, the people making these decisions need to be accountable for them. When a game fails, it is the developers who lose their jobs. The executives who greenlit a $400 million live-service game into an oversaturated market move on to the next quarterly earnings call. That disconnect between decision-making authority and personal consequence is at the heart of why this keeps happening.

Marathon may yet find its audience. Live-service games can evolve. Bungie has form in building communities over time with Destiny. But the broader pattern is undeniable: the industry is burning through billions of dollars and tens of thousands of careers on a model that produces far more failures than successes, and the people bearing the cost are never the ones who chose the direction.

And yet here we are, watching another $40 live-service game launch to fewer than 88,000 players, with held reviews and quarterly wipes, built on a 30-year-old IP that deserved better.

The industry does not have a talent problem. It has a leadership problem. And until that changes, the graveyard is only going to get bigger.

The industry lost 45,000 jobs in three years building games nobody asked for. How many more studios have to close before the people greenlighting these projects are the ones held accountable?