Marathon, Player Counts and Industry Anxiety | Unpacked

I'm surprised that Marathon is so popular but I think the much more surprising thing is that Marathon isn't something that just anyone can pick up and play. Most of the discourse surrounding the game is about how niche it is and how it commits to the hardcore crowd so effectively. I'm glad it made the call and was able to be as effective as it was, but if it fails I wonder if people will be willing to address how something like this is a gamble, that not everything that's good succeeds simply because the audience isn't large enough. But then again Sony's acquisition of Bungie might've been so expensive that the expectation for profit is far too high to allow for games that restrict their playerbase to this extent

I wonder if this pressure of active player numbers will give a rise to single player or co-op games.

Not sure if you heard, the online game store Robot Cache is shutting down in 30 days. Everything purchased will be inaccessible because they can't/won't separate their store page from the games people bought.

Related, I'm curious if you have any thoughts on the news that the estimated cost for the device of GTA6 (based on a ton of rough estimated costs, not all directly for the actual game like work space rent) is potentially between $1-3 Billion? And if this is anywhere near accurate, what lessons all the other game companies might take based on how well GTA6 sells and how fast?