While I didn't expect the game to be successful, I wasn't expecting player numbers to drop this drastically.
lol why not? Literally everybody else did except the Bungie fluffers.
I'm very curious what the mood is for the average developer at Bungie, especially going forward.
Having done my own stretch of time in the EA mines, it's a very "mercenary" environment. The writing's on the wall, no question: this game is cooked and its lifespan is finite and short. Layoffs are coming. The day-by-day mood is upbeat and jovial (they're getting paid, after all). The ones prone to anger (i.e. the trannies and LGBTBBQ drones) are angry, for all sorts of reasons (possibly including the poor adoption rate of their current pet project and the Obvious Bigotry™ causing it), but because they're generally useless, they aren't impacting the overall mood too much. They're always angry about
something, so they get tuned out.
Everyone at the studio for whom this
isn't their first gig is roughly dividing their work time each day evenly between 1) fucking around in the break room, attending meetings, socializing in person within the studio and then performing actual work, and 2) carefully (and quietly) cultivating and maintaining external relationships with personnel at other studios to make sure they've got somewhere to land (and resumes pre-tailored well in advance) when the inevitable layoffs come. Note that layoffs are
very routine at game dev studios; tenure is rare, and even highly-valued high-productivity employees are often washed out upon project completion, even for successful games (the suits figure "well shit, the work's
done now, right? Why do we need to keep paying them to stick around and do nothing?"). It is not uncommon for an experienced developer to begin revising his resume and get the feelers out within one week of starting a new gig, even if their new position is a full-time w/benefits one.
The newbies?
They're probably sweating a bit at this point.
How low does everyone think the player count needs to go before they just pack it in?
There's a critical make-or-break threshold they have to hit first -- a low enough player count where the matchmaking system starts breaking down and has to be manually tweaked on a regular basis to make sure people don't get stuck queueing for games indefinitely because there aren't enough "matching" players to throw into a lobby together. I think once they hit that point where they're tweaking matchmaking to keep queues moving, that'll be when the secret looming countdown timer of doom begins for real, and I doubt there's more than 3 months' worth of sand in that particular hourglass.
