Archived article: https://archive.md/HONwC
They’ll release one more update (my guess is whatever release-ready content they’ve already got), then the servers will shut down next Thursday.
“We don’t need player counts to be super huge in order to be successful” is starting to ring hollow.
By “dev team”, I’m guessing you mean the artists, designers, programmers, and testers; the people who spent the last five or so years actually creating the game. Yes, it sucks for them. Their years of work have effectively been thrown in the trash because of Wildlight’s management. I hope they find better work soon, and I hope the management become personae non gratae in the industry.
Honestly it’s the same thing with Concord, and it’s part of why it sucks to hear a lot of shit talk toward the devs of these games. Anyone who’s actually tried either game could tell the dev teams really did put their all into it and wanted to make something interesting and fun, but you can feel the c-suite decisions and live service bullshit weighing them down. Like if the game isn’t an instant hit, it gets shut down, and all that work thrown away. It really fucking sucks for the folks who actually put the work in.
I feel like the exact same thing’s gonna happen with Marathon too. Playtest this week was met with pretty mixed results, people either loved it or hated it. The actual devs are incredible, and having spent far too much time with D2 before dropping it, I’ve gotten to know a few folks on the team and can really vouch for them. But I can’t vouch for their management whatsoever, and they’re the reason I dropped that game entirely and will never touch another Bungie game. I have zero faith in Bungie management keeping this one alive.
They already took their millions in Tencent money and ran with it.
https://www.polygon.com/highguard-funding-tencent/