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The fixed-cost trap is the real story of 2026 ​

By Oleg Sidorkin, CTO of Cinevva

Bungie just ended active development on Destiny 2 after nine years, with layoffs to follow, and moved its people to Marathon, a game that lost more than half its concurrent players in its first month. A few weeks earlier, OpenAI shut down Sora after burning roughly a million dollars a day against about two million in lifetime revenue. Through the spring, studio after studio cut staff. It's easy to file these under different headers, live service fatigue, AI hype, a soft economy. They're the same failure wearing three costumes.

Three collapses, one shape ​

Each story has the same skeleton. A very expensive thing carries very high fixed costs. The audience shifts. The cost structure can't shift with it. Destiny 2 needed hundreds of people shipping content forever just to stand still. Sora's costs scaled with every video generated, so popularity made the bleeding worse, not better. A 300-person studio with one flagship in production runs a payroll that doesn't care whether the flagship is going well. When revenue moves and costs can't follow, the only lever left is to cut the people. That's why every one of these ends in layoffs.

The problem was never the product ​

Bungie's mistake wasn't that Destiny 2 failed. It ran for nine years and earned a devoted audience. The mistake was that the only follow-up was another nine-figure live service game, so when Marathon wobbled there was nothing smaller to fall back on. Sora wasn't a bad demo. It was a genuinely impressive model strapped to an economic engine that punished its own success. In both cases the thing they shipped worked. What didn't work was the size of the bet behind it. A studio that puts everything into one giant title has no shock absorbers. The first bad quarter is also the last one.

The only real defense is a cheap miss ​

Here's the part the headlines skip. The studios and tools that survive downturns aren't the ones that pick winners more often. Nobody picks winners reliably. They're the ones where a miss doesn't end the company. If a game costs a small team a few weeks instead of a few hundred people a few years, a flop is a Tuesday, not a funeral. The math that just ended Destiny 2's development assumes each bet is enormous and therefore each loss is fatal. Drop the cost of a single attempt low enough and the logic inverts. You get to be wrong most of the time, which is the only honest way to be right occasionally.

This is why the fixed-cost trap is structural, not a Bungie problem or an OpenAI problem. Any model that needs hundreds of people, or compute that grows with usage faster than revenue does, is fragile by design. It looks strong right up until the audience moves, and the audience always moves.

What this means if you're building ​

The future isn't fewer, bigger games carried by thousand-person teams. It's many more games made by small teams and individuals, where trying something costs almost nothing. That's not optimism, it's where the economics point. The audience that left Destiny didn't disappear. It fragmented across dozens of games, and the next wave that captures it will be cheaper to make, faster to ship, and easier to iterate on than any decade-long monolith.

That's the bet we're building at Cinevva. Games made and played in the browser, where the cost of an attempt is low enough that one miss doesn't take the studio with it. The economics that just ended Destiny 2's development are exactly the economics we built the platform to route around. The giants are learning the hard way that scale without a shock absorber is just exposure. The people who internalize that first get to build through the downturn instead of being cut by it.

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