Sony Lost Money After Marathon Failure

Added: 2026-05-14

[00:00:00]Ladies and gentlemen, we interrupt your regularly scheduled programming to bring you this special bulletin. After such a quiet weekend on the internet, I think it's time to revisit a lovely little game I haven't talked about in a little while, but everybody hits it's definitely a hot topic for discussion.

[00:00:17]No, I'm not talking about mixtape or anything like that. We're going to readdress or reapproach or poke our little head in and take a look at how Marathon's doing with a 9,000 10,000 player count, which isn't terrible in and of itself. However, there's a few other things, you know, that might, you know, change your opinion.

[00:00:39]The chart, a little misleading, but also not misleading. When you look at the number of players to date since day one of 88,000 players, where did all those people go?

[00:00:53]I am curious about that. But, you know, having a chart with a peak concurrent player count, all-time peak of 88,000, just slowly plummeting and plummeting and plummeting. So, with that being looked at, the one month, no, uh maybe a little not so much either, but it kind of looks like to me that perhaps Marathon has finally leveled out on the number of players that are playing this game on a daily basis. You know, from 13,000 13,000 up to 15,000 on the Friday. Look like it looks like it has its weekend player count, and so, the fact that people are still playing this game, regardless of how massive that number is, the only question to wonder is how successful does Sony think it is? How successful does Bungie think it is? And well, regardless of what you say, there's no denying the most recent news that came out, article on May 8th, IGN.

[00:01:56]Oh, it was updated on May 8th, So, we'll go with that. Good old Wesley Yinpool.

[00:02:01]Yinpool.

[00:02:02]Hyphenated name. I like it. Sony reports Now, just to be clear, this article is not coming from Fandom Pulse or Smash JT or Paul Tassi who goes from being a hater to a shill for Marathon depending on which way the wind is blowing every other minute. But, this is coming from IGN. Captain The captain of mainstream access shill media that will, well, promote the games that will get them the access.

[00:02:32]Sony reports 765 million-dollar impairment loss. Almost a billion dollars. Due to underperformance of Marathon developer Bungie. Now, they're talking about Marathon developer, not necessarily Marathon itself. We're not going to read that first that first sentence because it just repeats the whole article.

[00:02:55]Little backstory in case you don't know about PlayStation and Bundy Bungie and yeah. Owner bought Bungie, the original creator of Halo in early 2022 for 3.6 billion dollars with a B because they thought they could catch money, you know, what? Lightning in a bottle. I said money in a bottle. Trying to cash in on the popularity and the success that Bungie had prior to, I guess, recent developments in their game.

[00:03:23]Destiny 2 is not exactly doing as well as it used to.

[00:03:28]Who knows? Halo, well, once they got rid of Halo, Halo fell off a fell off a cliff.

[00:03:34]Over here, during a financial year ending in March 31st, 2026, Sony's game and network services segment, I skipped the line that I wanted to read out.

[00:03:45]Darn it.

[00:03:46]Studio has struggled financially since then with Destiny 2 failing to do business and its new game Marathon having a hard time breaking out. Oh no, IGN's calling it a failure. How could they? They're nothing but filthy disgusting haters. How dare you show actual numbers? How dare you show any of this and just ask the question, what is Sony going to do? What they What do they consider a failure? Anyway, as a result, Sony has admitted, finally, because they didn't want to admit the sales numbers at all, has finally admitted the acquisition has yet to pay off, resulting in these impairment charges. Sony is losing money on Bungie.

[00:04:27]There is no way to spin that.

[00:04:30]Hm.

[00:04:31]Uh, let's see.

[00:04:33]Now, the sentence that I'm going to read twice. Maybe not. Let's see.

[00:04:36]Sony's gaming and game and network services segment, of which PlayStation is part, suffered a 120 billion dollar yen, 765 million dollars US, impairment loss against Bungie assets. Hm. Had already reported a 31.5 billion yen, or 204 million dollars, impairment charges result of Destiny 2's underperformance.

[00:05:00]This is an eye-opener.

[00:05:03]Whether the Bungie acquisition, Destiny 2's underperformance, and now Marathon's I'm sorry, you can like the game all you want to. Marathon is underperforming.

[00:05:16]No ifs, no ands, no buts about it.

[00:05:19]It just is. You can like the game all you want to. And apparently, the people who are playing the game still to this day are liking the game. But hey, one week.

[00:05:29]We're going to be fair.

[00:05:31]I will say, if they can stay steady at this, who knows? Maybe that'll be enough. How many of these tens of 10,000 or thousands of players are whales? How much money are they spending? Is there even all that much to spend on Marathon?

[00:05:46]Huh.

[00:05:47]Don't know.

[00:05:48]Hardcore extraction shooter Marathon launched early May within the last fiscal year and crucially within the quarter in which Sony reported an additional $88 billion a massive loss.

[00:05:58]Loss, loss, loss. Impairment charge against Bungie. Loss, loss, loss.

[00:06:02]Again, this poses the question how long will Sony put up with it?

[00:06:09]I'm going to skip a few of this cuz that was meat and potatoes of it is this little quote right here. Where is this coming from?

[00:06:17]Do we see? During an investor focus Q&A, Sony Chief Financial Officer Lin Tao indicated the company will stick with Marathon in a bid to grow its user base because there is no CEO on the planet that is ever going to tell you the truth if it can possibly negatively affect the bottom line.

[00:06:34]Affect investor optics or the stock prices. Did you think that Lin Tao, the Chief Financial Officer, is going to come out and say, "It's gone like shit. I don't know how much longer we're going to keep the the servers running. I don't know how much longer we're going to leave Bungie as its own little entity instead of dissolving it and laying people off." Do you honestly think they're going to come out and say that? No, they're going to wait until the very last minute. The day before the layoffs are announced, if they happen, and when you're losing that kind of money on your investment I wouldn't be surprised if they have some lovely little financial specialist looking in how they can cut ties and recoup as much as they possibly can off of the what? $2 billion price price tag. Let's go back up to the top.

[00:07:21]This is a long one.

[00:07:22]$3.6 billion acquisition fee, price tag, whatever you want to call it.

[00:07:28]I was on this one.

[00:07:29]In our studio business, earnings from Bungie's title portfolio did not reach our expectations.

[00:07:36]They're finally admitting it.

[00:07:39]Do you think the shills out there that are just praising this game. You're just a hater. I don't play extraction shooters.

[00:07:47]The art style of Marathon doesn't bother me. I actually think it's cool. If it was a single-player or non-PV If it was strictly a PVE game, I guarantee I would play it.

[00:08:00]I don't care for extraction shooters. I don't care for most PvP games. So, yeah.

[00:08:07]But, can you finally admit the statement from the financial officer at Sony saying the same thing that schmucks like me have been saying this entire time.

[00:08:20]The names we get called, "You don't play games." I do, and you're not going to that that statement doesn't bother me.

[00:08:27]I don't need to show off my achievement score or my Xbox uh I don't even know what the hell those numbers are called on Sony and PlayStation. I can barely remember the achievement score on Steam because I don't concern myself with that.

[00:08:48]It's time to admit that Marathon is failing.

[00:08:53]Under expectations, underperformed, call it whatever you want to.

[00:08:58]So, we downwardly revised our business plan. They had to adjust their business plan to set their expectations even lower than they already were in order to make investors feel better?

[00:09:11]Oh, boy.

[00:09:12]That's what I'm getting from this.

[00:09:14]Uh revised our business plan and impaired the full amount of the fixed assets related to Bungie except for goodwill. I don't So, we downplayed downwardly revised our business plan and impaired the full amount of the fixed assets related to Bungie except for goodwill. So, they have goodwill. Here's the thing. I don't disagree with the statement right here, 100%. Player reception to Marathon is strong. That's because the people playing that game are fan of that genre of game.

[00:09:43]And unfortunately, it's not a very massive demographic.

[00:09:48]With the game receiving a Metacritic score of 82, aha, aha, and more than a 90% of player reviews on Steam being positive because the only way you can review a game on Steam is if you bought the game, which I think is fantastic.

[00:10:02]That's the good way to go. You don't have to worry about review bombing or whatever. Or you don't even have to worry about review boosting. Cuz that's more than nonsense that we have to deal with. Review bombs and review boosts and call whatever you want to.

[00:10:14]Toxic positivity.

[00:10:17]The people who bought the game and are playing the game are enjoying the game.

[00:10:22]Color me shocked.

[00:10:24]Engagement metrics such as retention, here's your retention right there. Your retention is only isn't even maybe 15,000. Yes, 15,000. This is your retention.

[00:10:35]And this is if this is your plateau, if this is your ultimate eventual flatline, not no, max.

[00:10:42]So, if eventually this number starts to level out, flatten out right here, then we got to wonder, will that be enough?

[00:10:52]Or was I?

[00:10:53]Hm. Going forward, we aim to improve the performance of the game by working to retain highly engaged core users through the introduction of additional content.

[00:11:01]This is talking corporate speak. Further improvements in the gameplay experience and expansion of the user base. How are you going to expand the user base if you're not going to change the core mechanics of the game?

[00:11:14]And if you change the core mechanics of the game, again, gameplay experience, then you might drive away the people who actually still like the game.

[00:11:22]It it you you're going to lose.

[00:11:24]While Bungie has dragged down Sony's financial performance for the year, sales for the game and network services segment were essentially flat.

[00:11:33]You don't want them to be flat. You want them to be going upwards upward trend.

[00:11:36]Operating income was up uh okay. That's not essentially flat. Up 12% is better than down 12%. Looking ahead, Sony expects its current financial year to end with a flat operating income. That investors don't want to hear that. Due to the incorporation of an increased investments for the next generation platform. This is holy this is corporate investor speak that likely they don't even understand.

[00:12:03]We plan to base our PS5 hardware sales in fiscal year 26 on the volume of memory we can procure at reasonable prices and we expect hardware profitability to be essentially the same as fiscal year 25.

[00:12:17]That Okay, I am Okay, contrary to popular belief, I am not retarded.

[00:12:23]And I didn't understand anything I just read.

[00:12:26]Huh?

[00:12:27]Bottom line, how long are they going to tolerate this?

[00:12:30]Bottom line, 1 week?

[00:12:33]Is this where Marathon stays for the foreseeable future? Is that enough? Are there enough whales to financially mm support the servers remaining up? And how long how much more money does Sony have to lose after 600 765 million dollars before they just decide to cut their losses?

[00:12:54]You can sit there and tell everyone, "We're going to support it for a year.

[00:12:57]We have no intention of cutting ties. We have no intention of dropping this game or anything like that." What do you expect them to say?

[00:13:07]Okay?

[00:13:09]I wouldn't expect anything else.

[00:13:11]On the surface, they're going to say that over and over and over again so the investors can hear it and look for any sort of way to spin the what some would say abysmal numbers for Marathon for for Destiny 2.

[00:13:26]It's not good. Eventually, hmm, how much longer will Sony put up with it? Let me know what you think in the comment section down below. Leave a like, leave a dislike if you want. All those little things I used to do to beg you to do and I hope to see you on the next one. Bye.

[00:13:38]Yeah.