YouTube keeps recommending me Rise and Fall videos for Halo/Bungie and what I've gathered from those is that Bungie were never particularly competent as a studio, they consistently failed upwards while being lucky enough to have a handful of talented people there to create something people loved.
Microsoft probably did the best job of tard-wrangling them, relatively speaking; I don't know if Sony was even paying attention to them until the Marathon alpha flopped last year.
The lesson being learned is that a game studio (and probably applies to movie studios and other productions) is
not a sum of it's parts and bigger isn't always better. A production team is fragile, delicate, and not something you can just disrupt constantly (via layoffs, hiring sprees, mergers, acquisitions, etc). It's
hyper-critical that every person on the team understands what it's doing and is working in the same direction.
Halo started with ~10 people and eventually became ~35.
350 people worked on Halo 4 - was it 1000% better than Halo 1 because the staff count increased by 1000% (or was it 300% better than Halo 3, because it had 300% of the people working on it?).
So the rise and fall of Bungie is the same rise and fall every studio has run into - it's not something that scales all that well. When Bungie was a lean team of ~100 people - they excelled (Halo 1 to Halo 3) and when they tried to scale it up (Halo 4 to Marathon) to comical numbers - it falls apart comically. It's simply too hard to get more then (IMO) 100 people to all successfully work on a single game.
It isn't just Halo/Bungie, it's the core reason that big studios are dying left and right - and why Microsoft and Sony (and Embracer, EA, ABK, etc) are stuck holding the bag.
Halo 1 = ~40 people
Halo 4 = 350 People
Elder Scrolls 3 = 50 people
Skyrim = 100 people
Starfield = 500 people
Assassin's Creed 1 = 100 people
Assassin's Creed Shadows =
thousands
Team Fortress 2 = ~25 people
Overwatch 1 = ~50 people
Overwatch 2 = 300 people
GTA 3 = ~40 people
GTA 5 = 1000 devs, 6000 people credited
You can look at the list and decide which games were terrible for you own taste, but, it's hard to look at the last ~10 years of releases and think that something correct is being done by studios.
It's why indie games have had massively oversized reach in games space - the smaller teams turn out a better product. Undertale, Stardew, all the way to Expedition 33 have shown that a small dedicated team can still get it done, just the way most of the current huge studios started out.
