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[RoboEight]

I think the game will do fine if they stick with it. I doubt it'll become massive but if they can find the right balance between casual and hardcore content it'll be a slow burn for them. The game is really good and has a lot of good stuff going for it and if they can buff their solo stuff and add some different content I can see it becoming a steady game. If they go full hardcore on it though I can see it pushing a lot of people away.

 

[StreetsofBeige]

Only 30,500 players at 1pm eastern U.S. time seems a bit low for a Saturday? Last weekend it managed to peak above 50k both days but that may be difficult today.

Tracking about -20% less than last Saturday which peaked around 54k. Might do about 45k today.

 

[StreetsofBeige]

Again, more @yurinka logic. He liked to pretend that because of 2024 numbers (top 10!!) that 2025 wasn't about to fall off a cliff (which it did). Shadow and Order isn't even a paid expansion... most of the people who will stick around playing it probably already picked up the Battle Pass in the bundle last year. A hypothetical end-of-year expansion would surely bring in some revenue... but the odds of it being significantly bigger than Renegades or Edge of Fate from a content perspective are practically zero, and the odds of it pulling back revenue to even 2025 levels are zero.

Sales don't mean anything when you got a pricey studio like Bungie. That's why they already did two waves of layoffs and Pete Parsons even said a couple years ago the studio was in the red. And that's when destiny was doing even better.

So just imagine where they are now. Destiny and marathon combined now are nowhere close to destiny two ears ago.

 

[falconhoof]

I'm really struggling to understand the meaning "top 50 - 25 earning game on Steam" line.

Fortnite is making billions but it's apparently spending billions more. If Fortnite was on Steam it would be in the top 10 of earners. That clearly means fuck all.

Companies work by looking forward. They make decisions based on future projections. Saying you did well a few years ago means shit all.

Sounds like Sony Santa Monica had no expectations for big earnings in the years when they didn't release a product, that would all be factored into their accounting. They won't be a press release saying "We launched no games and shockingly got outsold by our peers".

 

[Avid Reading Horse]

The numbers are the numbers.

The numbers were the numbers. The start of 2025 was the Titanic seeing the iceberg ahead and it already being too late to turn. The start of 2026 is "okay we've hit the iceberg and now we're sinking and we don't have enough life boats" but surely rescue is coming... where we're at now is the rescue ship (Marathon) has appeared to hit its own iceberg and isn't really in a position to help. 10/10 metaphor if I do say so myself.

The lights are a-flickering.

In Destiny 2s "disaster year" it was still a top 50 - 25 earning game on Steam.

What I'm asking you to consider is how much drought studios are generating between big releases.

I don't really care what Sony single-player studios are generating. But they could probably put God of War Ragnarok on the Steam Summer Sale for $20 and beat whatever the hell revenue bump Renamed Shadow and Order will provide.

 

[Nydius]

I think the game will do fine if they stick with it. I doubt it'll become massive but if they can find the right balance between casual and hardcore content it'll be a slow burn for them.

Therein lies the issue: They can't afford "a slow burn".

They needed this game to be massive. It needed mass market appeal and big sales numbers. This isn't a low budget title from a small dev team. Marathon is a triple-A game with a triple-A budget and a bloated studio whose only other game is the almost-nine-year-old (and rapidly declining) Destiny 2. Marathon needed to generate near-peak Destiny-esque numbers to cover how much they've spent on the development and marketing of the game. Sticking with it means spending an ever increasing amount of money on a game that's already deep in the red. It's unlikely it will ever reach it's launch week peak without going full F2P but to do that they'd have to completely retool their entire MTX system.

 

[Kronark]

The only way I'd ever be interested in playing Destiny again is if they'd release a next gen 60/120FPS patch for Destiny 1. Do that and I'd immediately jump back in, start running the old raids again, running patrols, leveling alts, and probably even spend money on D1 Eververse. But they'll never do that. They don't want people going backwards.

I've thought about this a lot since I quit Destiny 2. What would it take to win me back, and I've failed to come up with an answer that could be realistically implemented. At a minimum everything needs to be unvaulted (Including seasonal content) but I'd basically want them to undo the last 5 years of the direction of the game.

I'd need them to roll back all their bullshit that increasingly made the game more and more hardcore. No more seasonal mods (Unstoppable, anti barrier, etc) and the associated champion enemies, no more adept gear and weekly powerful drops hidden behind hard mode raid completion, trials, and grandmaster nightfalls. It's fine to have titles and cosmetics tied to that stuff for players to earn but they made it the central focus of the game. The best guns, best armor, etc all involved engaging with the game at it's least fun moments. Nothing about the way power scaling works in Destiny is fun. You do 1/4 the damage and take 4x the damage, and it's the laziest way to handle difficulty. I want the game to go back to year 2 / 3 where yes there was power creep but that power creep made the grind worth it. I want to go grind the powerful ass guns to then be able to make the hardcore stuff approachable. Bungie somewhere around the start of Year 4 decided that power creep was a problem and decided they needed to sunset all our weapons at the time in response. Instead of scaling up the enemy encounters to compensate for the power weapons they made the decision that gear basically shouldn't increase in power at all...

Which raises the question, what the fuck am I grinding for then? Bungie then proceeded to slowly re-release all the sunset guns and same architype weapons with new skins and new perk pools. See you want this new gun because it has a perk that reloads 0.2 seconds quicker after you perform a slide... Fuck all that. So instead of guns being a source of power what actually became the source of power were the seasonal mods. You could do some insanely broken shit like get near infinite grenades but every 3 months they'd change the mods and all of that went away. For some players this is fun because they get to lab / build craft. I don't personally enjoy that and many other players didn't... So we'd end up finding the broken meta build of the season and just using that. I found it highly annoying to have to keep switching up my playstyle every 3 months. It's like a fighting game assigns you a character to play and then every 3 months says ohh you're playing this fighter now. Nothing about this system felt organic or earned. Basically instead of earning power the entire game revolved around you being powerful, the game coming along and kicking you in the nuts every 3 months, and then saying earn that power back again.

There's other ways the game became unapproachable too with mechanics becoming increasingly complex. Vow of the Disciple was a dog shit raid for instance and I don't think I could ever get a friend into it. The first encounter requires players to memorize like 30 different symbols and agree on common names for all of them. Unless you had a weekly group though I found everyone in the community used slightly different callouts and it just became annyoing. What was "give" or "gift" to some players was "offering" to other groups. It just became completely unapproachable if you weren't a dedicated raider. Earlier raids were much better designed to be approachable and I could walk a friend through Leviathan, Eater of Worlds, Scourge of the Past, Last Wish, etc. I watched a video that explained the first encounter of Salvation's Edge and I couldn't believe how overly complicated Bungie had made this shit to basically cater to streamers and the raid race crowd. Like people complain about the new player experience being confusing and it is but I really think shit like the end game is what turns these people off for good.

Destiny is basically too fucked at this point to save. I don't have much hope that Bungie would make a Destiny 3 and not repeat the same bad design.

 

[Guilty_AI]

~300 are on Marathon.
~500 are on Destiny.

Bungie is not a 1,000 person studio anymore.

The same logic can be used on Guerilla Games, Santa Monica, Team Asobi, Sucker Punch etc...

They generate a lot of money for 6 months - 1 year and then go 4 - 5 years in a drought.

These studios are a fraction of the size of Bungie, and they dont exist in a vacuum as Sony as the publisher utilizes all of them to guarantee multiple releases through the years. Common strategy among publishers like Saber interactive who dont have a single milking cow.

You could argue Bungie is also part of that, but their purpose within Sony is ultimately different from those others and it was meant to be their way into the live service market. As that appears to have been more and more of a mistake, their future and that of marathon becomes increasingly uncertain.

 

[Men_in_Boxes]

These studios are a fraction of the size of Bungie, and they dont exist in a vacuum as Sony as the publisher utilizes all of them to guarantee multiple releases through the years. Common strategy among publishers like Saber interactive who dont have a single milking cow.

Not really. Santa Monica, Naughty Dog, and Guerilla are all somewhat comparable to the Destiny team in terms of size.

They're all going through much bigger droughts than Bungie. Will be very interesting to see how this does...

 

[drotahorror]

Not really. Santa Monica, Naughty Dog, and Guerilla are all somewhat comparable to the Destiny team in terms of size.

They're all going through much bigger droughts than Bungie. Will be very interesting to see how this does...

How the fuck is 400 employees comparible to 800?

Tell Sony they're the same.

 

[Men_in_Boxes]

How the fuck is 400 employees comparible to 800?

Tell Sony they're the same.

The Destiny team is 500, not 800.

 

[Guilty_AI]

Not really. Santa Monica, Naughty Dog, and Guerilla are all somewhat comparable to the Destiny team in terms of size.

They're all going through much bigger droughts than Bungie. Will be very interesting to see how this does...

The largest one of the crowd is insomaniac with around 500 - also the most productive so the Destiny team argument doesn't fly as they did release 4 games so far this gen and are set to release a fifth (not to mention spider man is one of sonys highest selling games). Others fall around the 200-300 mark. Minor ones like Asobi had less than 100 when astrobot came out.

Out of all, ND has probably been the one most absent this gen, while also being prob the second largest after insomaniac, so definitely a net negative. But - guess why that is the case? Thats right, because they were put to make a GAAS, only to have that GAAS cancelled after years of work. So even those losses were over the endless pursuit for a live service golden goose.

 

[Kronark]

Not really. Santa Monica, Naughty Dog, and Guerilla are all somewhat comparable to the Destiny team in terms of size.

Santa Monica and Guerilla are close to 400 as far as I can find online. For Naughty Dog I've seen sources claiming it's also close to 400, but some saying 800-1000. Some of those high counts link back to the Linked In page for naughty dog where they again list 200-500 employees. I would wager it's 375-450 but there is conflicting info.

Bungie on the other hand used to be 1200, but after 2 rounds of layoffs is now around 800.

The Destiny team was ~800 people for a majority of it's dev life post Activision breakup. Including Activision, High Moon and Vicarious Visions helped heavily on the initial release and forsaken expansion, and they could have had easily ~1000-1100 devs for that period. It got cut to 700 after Lightfall and the current size after Final Shape which is estimated to be around 500. It's not really fair to imply that Destiny has had a smaller team working on it when for a majority of it's life cycle it has had significantly more staff.

 

[Men_in_Boxes]

The largest one of the crowd is insomaniac with around 500 - also the most productive so the Destiny team argument doesn't fly as they did release 4 games so far this gen and are set to release a fifth (not to mention spider man is one of sonys highest selling games). Others fall around the 200-300 mark. Minor ones like Asobi had less than 100 when astrobot came out.

True, but they're also generating significantly less revenue than the Destiny 2. Again, during Destiny 2s "disaster year" it was still a top 50 - 25 earning game on Steam. The other studios are almost certainly not generating anything close to that (bar Naughty Dog with TLoU2 Remaster).

Out of all, ND has probably been the one most absent this gen, while also being prob the second largest after insomaniac, so definitely a net negative. But - guess why that is the case? Thats right, because they were put to make a GAAS, only to have that GAAS cancelled after years of work. So even those losses were over the endless pursuit for a live service golden goose.

Incorrect. The main Naughty Dog team who made TLoU2 was put on Intergalactic immediately after TLoU2. Games now take 6 - 7 years to make so that's why Intergalactic is taking so long.

The Live Service team who produced 2 concept art images did not meaningfully slow Intergalactic down.

 

[falconhoof]

The number of employees is a pretty pointless argument. It's meaningful in only to describe if the production is AAA or not, and by AAA I mean in the many hundreds with many hundreds more of support and outsourcing.

All these studios productions are behemoths. Saying a team is 300 might be describing the number of people sat in a building, but it doesn't describe the total base of people who contributed to a production, including external outsourcing studios who might still be getting paid as part of ongoing development.

The fact is as I posted before. Destiny 2 under-performed last year BY SONY'S OWN METRICS. Steam top 50 be fucked. It's meaningless.

 

[Guilty_AI]

True, but they're also generating significantly less revenue than the Destiny 2.

Gonna need proper data on that because from what ive read spider man games alone generated 4 billion dollars in revenue compared to 1 billion of destiny 2 so far.

The Live Service team who produced 2 concept art images did not meaningfully slow Intergalactic down.

This live service team who "produced 2 concept arts" was composed of hundreds of developers and worked on factions over years. It definitely impacted other projects.

 

[th4tguy]

I'm really struggling to understand the meaning "top 50 - 25 earning game on Steam" line.

Fortnite is making billions but it's apparently spending billions more. If Fortnite was on Steam it would be in the top 10 of earners. That clearly means fuck all.

Companies work by looking forward. They make decisions based on future projections. Saying you did well a few years ago means shit all.

Sounds like Sony Santa Monica had no expectations for big earnings in the years when they didn't release a product, that would all be factored into their accounting. They won't be a press release saying "We launched no games and shockingly got outsold by our peers".

Epic is taking money made from Fortnite and spending it on other things that aren't making any profit.

 

[Men_in_Boxes]

Gonna need proper data on that because from what ive read spider man games alone generated 4 billion dollars in revenue compared to 1 billion of destiny 2 so far.

Spiderman does sell a lot. Insomniacs drought years are likely not as bad as the others.

This live service who "produced 2 concept arts" was composed of hundreds of developers and worked on factions over years. It definitely impacted other projects.

Well, if you believe that then expect Intergalactic to come out around 2030 - 2032 because it's going to take 6 years to make no matter what.

 

[Men_in_Boxes]

The fact is as I posted before. Destiny 2 under-performed last year BY SONY'S OWN METRICS. Steam top 50 be fucked. It's meaningless.

Also an irrelevant statement.

Each studios revenue expectations are different. Bungie is not a drought studio which means Sony has different expectations for Bungie than Santa Monica.

Make no mistake, Sony does not like droughts. Drought studios have to hit big numbers at launch to take them through the down years.

 

[xBlueStonex]

I can't believe how bad Marathon is bombing on Xbox. You literally have to scroll past For Honor (2017), Wobbly Life (2020), Skate 3 (2010), and Fight Night Champion (2011) just to find it on the Most-Played list. Ho-Lee Fuk.

 

[falconhoof]

Incorrect. The main Naughty Dog team who made TLoU2 was put on Intergalactic immediately after TLoU2. Games now take 6 - 7 years to make so that's why Intergalactic is taking so long.

The Live Service team who produced 2 concept art images did not meaningfully slow Intergalactic down.

That implies Intergalactic and Factions were two separate things and the production of Factions had no bearing on Intergalactic.

And yet.

And factions was in a playable state when cancelled.

 

[Men_in_Boxes]

That implies Intergalactic and Factions were two separate things and the production of Factions had no bearing on Intergalactic.

And yet.

And factions was in a playable state when cancelled.

Well, see you in the Intergalactic thread ~2030 - 2032 then.

Also, games and prototypes are playable very early on in development. Phil Spencer was playing Perfect Dark like 4 years before it was cancelled. Being playable doesn't mean much.

 

[falconhoof]

Well, see you in the Intergalactic thread ~2030 - 2032 then.

Also, games and prototypes are playable very early on in development. Phil Spencer was playing Perfect Dark like 4 years before it was cancelled. Being playable doesn't mean much.

Keep talking, I'm loving all this wisdom you're providing.

 

[Guilty_AI]

Spiderman does sell a lot. Insomniacs drought years are likely not as bad as the others.

Santa Monica generated 1.4 billion with God of War games since the reboot, and their team is still smaller than that on destiny 2. Guerrilla generated over 1 billion with Horizon series, with half the team size of destiny 2.

Destiny 2 might (have) be(en) a high earner, but it isn't all that compared to other high earner series on the single player space.

 

[Men_in_Boxes]

Santa Monica generated 1.4 billion with God of War games since the reboot, and their team is still smaller than that on destiny 2. Guerrilla generated over 1 billion with Horizon series, with half the team size of destiny 2.

Destiny 2 might (have) be(en) a high earner, but it isn't all that compared to other high earner series on the single player space.

I see you've attempted to ignore my singular point - drought years.

Keep talking, I'm loving all this wisdom you're providing.

Naughty Dog employed hundreds of employees for Factions 2 but...

- There were no mass firings at Naughty Dog after its cancellation.

- Intergalactic will be out in 2027.

 

[Guilty_AI]

I see you've attempted to ignore my singular point - drought years.

A. It hardly matters if the amount generated is the same, and
B. You're now ignoring my point about countering drought with frequent releases from multiple studios.

Your argument was that it didn't matter because destiny 2 was apparently generating multiple times more than these other games when, in reality, it wasn't.

 

[Men_in_Boxes]

A. It hardly matters if the amount generated is the same, and
B. You're now ignoring my point about countering drought with frequent releases from multiple studios.

I'm just staying on point. Destiny 2 is making way more money than traditional drought studios during drought years. This matters because there's more risk attached should Santa Monica work 7 years on a new game.

You saying that revenue generation patterns don't matter tells me you don't know how this business works.

Your argument was that it didn't matter because destiny 2 was apparently generating multiple times more than these other games when, in reality, it wasn't.

I'm seeing different data than you.

Bungie grew to 1,600 in 2023, and dropped back down to 800 in 2024/2025. This, along with Bungie saying they "started running in the red" suggests Destiny 2 was a behemoth at its peak.

Santa Monica has never grown past ~350

The estimates I'm seeing online is that Destiny 2 generated between 2 - 3 billion. This is significantly higher than both God of Wars 1.4 billion...but again Destiny 2 is generating more during the drought.

Bungie was sold for 3.6b, which suggests to me that Destiny 2 was a behemoth. The people saying "Sony paid too much" have 0 experience buying companies and 0 hard data how much Bungie was making.

Drought studios carry more risk because the market changes so much in 7 years.

 

[Esquie]

Starting to root for this game now. I just want to see Men_in_Boxes happy. Didn't read any of this page but scrolling down you can see the effort being put in is unparalleled. How can ya not root for a guy like that? Dude just loves the game and wants it to succeed.

 

[Guilty_AI]

The estimates I'm seeing online is that Destiny 2 generated between 2 - 3 billion. This is significantly higher than both God of Wars 1.4 billion...but again Destiny 2 is generating more during the drought.

and like i said, i want to know where you took this from, because all i can find of Destiny 2's revenue over this last gen or ever since its free-to-play release is "hundreds of millions", so the 1B figure was actually me being generous.

 

[PeteBull]

Starting to root for this game now. I just want to see Men_in_Boxes happy. Didn't read any of this page but scrolling down you can see the effort being put in is unparalleled. How can ya not root for a guy like that? Dude just loves the game and wants it to succeed.

True that, at this point Men_in_Boxes is our champion, people's champion, pogchamp even

 

[calico]

Are the 'drought studios' carrying more risk than paying $3.6bn for Bungie? How many drought years would that have paid for?

Even if the price made sense based on their (evidently flawed) analysis at the time, they for sure know they paid too much now. They knew that even before Flopathon released.

 

[Men_in_Boxes]

Starting to root for this game now. I just want to see Men_in_Boxes happy. Didn't read any of this page but scrolling down you can see the effort being put in is unparalleled. How can ya not root for a guy like that? Dude just loves the game and wants it to succeed.

I am the Nathan Algren of NeoGAF.

I am The Last Gamer.

 

[Guilty_AI]

I am The Last Gamer.

Cause gaas is dying and you're one of the last of your kind?

 

[CentralScrutinizer]

I am the Nathan Algren of NeoGAF.

I am The Last Gamer.

Makes sense, you'd have to be a crazed Scientologist to believe in marathon.

Are Scientology jokes permitted? If not I'll edit.

 

[Men_in_Boxes]

Cause gaas is dying and you're one of the last of your kind?

PlayStations Business Briefings are coming up pretty soon.

The "GAAS is dying" numbers definitely didn't show up in their 2025 data. If memory serves, "add on content and subscription" accounted for roughly 2x the amount of traditionally priced games".

We'll see if that gap shrinks or grows in May.

 

[calico]

Maybe they'll acknowledge they overpaid for Bungie to an even greater extent than they previously acknowledged. They did say that could happen if Marathon flopped, but perhaps it's too soon.

 

[SScorpio]

True, but they're also generating significantly less revenue than the Destiny 2. Again, during Destiny 2s "disaster year" it was still a top 50 - 25 earning game on Steam. The other studios are almost certainly not generating anything close to that (bar Naughty Dog with TLoU2 Remaster).


Incorrect. The main Naughty Dog team who made TLoU2 was put on Intergalactic immediately after TLoU2. Games now take 6 - 7 years to make so that's why Intergalactic is taking so long.

The Live Service team who produced 2 concept art images did not meaningfully slow Intergalactic down.

The problem is not every role is needed at all times through the development. Modern game dev is a shit show where a single person with a vision is no longer able to drag something across a finish line in a reasonable time frame.

Studios should have two to three projects in active development at any given time. Rotating staff between them as needed. A game takes six years? Fine, designer and writer work on developing the world along side a small concept art team. You then have a small dev team prototyping game play systems. Once you've figured out what the game is and come up with a plan for a final vision. Then you put the bulk of the studio on it creating the full levels and final assets.

Everything is now designed by committee with everyone getting a voice and ends up with too many cooks in the kitchen. And you get dozens upon dozens of systems that end up getting scraped and all the work tossed.

Just look at all the great games by small teams that are less than 1/10th the size of the big studios. When you spent much less developing, it take fewer sales to turn a profit. And a single failure didn't just blow through almost a decade of all of a studio's dev time. When that happens the studio should be bankrupted with how much they blowing through cash. With more frequent releases a single stinker can be recovered from as your other games are still being sold a many games still sell over a decade after coming out now. That let's you still have revenue to keep funding the studio and let everyone move on to the next game which will hopefully be a success.

 

[Arsic]

Maybe they'll acknowledge they overpaid for Bungie to an even greater extent than they previously acknowledged. They did say that could happen if Marathon flopped, but perhaps it's too soon.

lol what? Who is they, Sony?

"We overpaid. Hey investors we played around with your money knowingly."

Lmao.

 

[calico]

Who is they, Sony?

Yes

 

[StreetsofBeige]

6 pm completed hour stats.

Compared to yesterday (Sat vs Fri): 40.1k vs 33.6k (+6,500k or +19%)

Sat vs Sat: 40.1k vs 51.2k (-11.1k or -22%)

 

[Moridianae]

6 pm completed hour stats.

Compared to yesterday (Sat vs Fri): 40.1k vs 33.6k (+6,500k or +19%)

Sat vs Sat: 40.1k vs 51.2k (-11.1k or -22%)

So a fairly standard weekend bump, but still down. Will be interesting to see what happens next week.

 

[StreetsofBeige]

So a fairly standard weekend bump, but still down. Will be interesting to see what happens next week.

Aside from cryo bump days which helps the ballpark week over week comparison per day is about -20% since launch. Cryo helps but fizzles out fast. Most days are still somewhere at -15% to -23% compared to prior week. Very consistent two weeks in a row.

So assuming it continues Monday using -19% (took a middle number), this past Monday's peak was 44.4k. So less 19% should be about 36k. Then it'll trend down to 30k (usual -5% per day) till next week's Fri-Sun bumps.

 

[Guilty_AI]

guess this isn't breaking the 50k anymore huh

 

[Hollywood Hitman]

Starting to root for this game now. I just want to see Men_in_Boxes happy. Didn't read any of this page but scrolling down you can see the effort being put in is unparalleled. How can ya not root for a guy like that? Dude just loves the game and wants it to succeed.

Im not, I want to see marathon go down in flames and men in boxes with it!

 

[Guilty_AI]

Im not, I want to see marathon go down in flames and men in boxes with it!

he'll then just find his next pet "mario 64 moment" live service game

 

[lifa-cobex]

I can't believe how bad Marathon is bombing on Xbox. You literally have to scroll past For Honor (2017), Wobbly Life (2020), Skate 3 (2010), and Fight Night Champion (2011) just to find it on the Most-Played list. Ho-Lee Fuk.

TBF that console is dead.
It's one thing to go and buy Marathon thinking "this has staying power"
It's a whole other level to buy it on an x-box.

 

[lifa-cobex]

Starting to root for this game now. I just want to see Men_in_Boxes happy. Didn't read any of this page but scrolling down you can see the effort being put in is unparalleled. How can ya not root for a guy like that? Dude just loves the game and wants it to succeed.

It's like watching a Christian youth pastor going to middle school to teach about the dangers of sex before marriage.

 

[MMaRsu]

guess this isn't breaking the 50k anymore huh

 

[OuterLimits]

Damn, couldn't even hit 45k on a Saturday. Cryo and ranked are only giving marginal bumps on weekends.(which is still 50% less players than launch day peak several weeks ago).

Not sure what they can do to get new players, but it needs to happen soon.

 

[Conflict NZ]

Damn, couldn't even hit 45k on a Saturday. Cryo and ranked are only giving marginal bumps on weekends.(which is still 50% less players than launch day peak several weeks ago).

Not sure what they can do to get new players, but it needs to happen soon.

I think F2P would be the only move they can pull in the short term but the backlash from people who bought the game three weeks ago would be enormous. I don't think any amount of free weekends will work when the Server Slam already was that effectively.

If Monday has the usual drop then I think this game is in real trouble.