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If you dared to look at any YouTube or Twitch chat during any of last week’s livestreams, you’ll have seen people mention Destiny 3.
Unironically, I think it may have been the most talked about title of the past week – even though it’s not even in development.
Bungie released the last ever update for Destiny 2 yesterday, and while we don’t have console engagement numbers, it hit its highest concurrent player count peak on Steam in over two years. Its high of 167k players was almost ten times what new game Marathon could muster.
Some of this is fans returning to reminisce; some of it is part of a coordinated community effort to send a message to parent company Sony that there’s still demand for a Destiny 3.
Reporting from Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier implied the Japanese giant skipped on the sequel after realising just how much money it would cost to make.
With yesterday’s update, Destiny 2 is now “content complete”, and while its servers will continue to be supported, there’ll be no new activities added to the game.
Bungie, meanwhile, will turn its attention to Marathon, which on Steam at least is performing poorly – even after its big Season 2 update. Layoffs are expected, and Sony has written off huge amounts of the $3.6 billion it spent on the Washington studio.
While it’s unlikely to have any influence at all on the bean counters, almost 400k people have shown up to sign a Change.org petition demanding the development of Destiny 3. And while I’m sure these campaigns will eventually peter out, it’s clear there’s a lot of pent-up frustration within the looter shooter’s fanbase.
As someone from the outside looking in, I think Marathon has become the punching bag of a variety of angered gamers: Bungie is disliked within the PlayStation community because of its alleged role in the cancellation of The Last of Us Factions, as well as being the spearhead of Sony’s flagging live service push.
Not only that, it feels like some Destiny 2 players want the extraction shooter to fail because they’d rather the studio work on their favourite franchise instead.
I’m not sure how any of this gets resolved, and I’ll maintain that Sony needlessly entangling itself in this entire mess is one of its biggest bungles of the generation.
PlayStation now finds itself forced to foot the bill for one of the most expensive studios in the industry, with no sign of Destiny 3, a dead Destiny 2, and a floundering Marathon. What a mess!