Spider-Noir canceled after one season at Prime Video despite receivin…

Despite critical acclaim and a slew of Emmy nominations, Spider-Noir will not be returning for a second season at Prime Video.

Per Deadline, it seems like Amazon MGM Studios and Sony Pictures Television expected bigger streaming numbers when making their decision. But given recent reports that the first season's budget was somewhere around $400 million, I can see why the studios might've needed the show to become a megahit in order to justify spending that money on a second season.

Amazon and Sony are still moving ahead with their multi-title deal to use IP from Sony's Universe of Marvel characters. You might remember that the first Spider-Man spin-off, Silk: Spider-Society, was ultimately canceled before entering production. Spider-Noir is now the second canceled project... and there's a third on the way. According to Deadline, there are still multiple projects on development, and one is "nearing a series order." Details are, of course, being kept under wraps.

Spider-Noir saw Nicolas Cage as a jaded, down-on-his-luck private detective version of Ben Reilly aka the Spider, who finds himself returning to superheroism and going up against classic Rogue Gallery villains like Sandman and Silvermane. The series has a 91% on Rotten Tomatoes, with our own Spider-Noir review praising the show's originality and Cage's excellent and equally odd acting choices.

Spider-Noir is streaming now in both black-and-white and in color on Prime Video. For more, check out our Spider-Noir review, or if you're still confused about how Spider-Noir is connected to the Spider-Verse movies, we've got the answer.

In 2021, as studio CEO Pete Parsons cited the company's recent "tremendous growth and opportunity," Bungie announced its plans for a massive expansion to its Bellevue, Washington headquarters. The campus embiggening, which internal sources have reportedly described as costing "hundreds of millions" of dollars, more than doubled the size of Bungie's offices from 84,000 square feet to just under 211,000.

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Now, after five and a half years of spending sprees, publisher acquisitions, stumbling product launches, project cancellations, and repeated mass layoffs, Bungie appears to be seeking subletters for the goliath game development headquarters it's no longer capable of filling.

According to a 10-page leasing brochure reviewed by The Game Post, Bungie is seeking interested renters to sublease its expansive headquarters, listing its 210,984 square feet as a "turn-key" production facility. In addition to expected office fixtures, the listing also features a dedicated lobby, gym and exercise facilities (including a rock climbing wall), a motion-capture studio, a cafe, catering space, and a private exterior patio.

While the brochure didn't directly identify the studio, a statement provided to press verified that Bungie was actively pursuing a sublease.

"Bungie is exploring options to sublease its campus in Bellevue, Washington. The studio transitioned to a digital-first model several years ago, and this move reflects the team's evolving workplace needs and the effectiveness of its remote collaboration," Bungie said. "Bungie will continue to maintain a physical office presence in Bellevue."

Bungie formally adopted remote work eligibility for most of its roles in 2022, following the studio's shift to work-from-home development during the COVID-19 lockdown years—effectively defeating the purpose of its office expansion due to circumstances that would have been impossible to predict during its early planning stages.

Bungie wasn't the only games company to make ill-fated investments during the height of the pandemic: Analysts have repeatedly cited overly-ambitious expansions and acquisitions—propelled by the COVID era's low interests rates and explosion of at-home entertainment revenue—as one of the driving forces behind the games industry's brutal cost-cutting in the years that followed.

Bungie's overextension, however, was particularly drastic. After Sony purchased the studio for $3.6 billion in 2022, Bungie leadership embarked on a rampant hiring spree, adding hundreds of developers to the payroll to fill out development teams for a swath of simultaneous incubation projects—projects that would prove unsustainable as the impact of Covid waned and revenues started to tumble across the industry.

A mass layoff followed in October 2023, affecting roughly 100 employees. The next round cut 220 developers in July 2024 as fallout from Bungie leadership having reportedly "overstated their studio’s financial prospects to Sony," leading to a dire enough fiscal outlook that even the success of Destiny 2's Final Shape expansion couldn't salvage it. As Sony intensified its oversight amidst the mounting turmoil, Bungie's leadership began to abandon ship, culminating with Pete Parsons departing the studio in 2025—presumably in one of his vintage collector cars.

Bungie staff ultimately suffered another sweeping layoff in June 2026, with most of the Destiny team losing their jobs in the aftermath of Destiny 2's end of live service. At peak employment, Bungie's staff numbered over 1,600; in July 2024, Parsons said the studio numbered around 850. The WARN notice issued for this June's layoff indicated at least 292 jobs were affected.

In other words, if all of Bungie's remaining employees gathered in its office, there would be fewer than 600 people to fill its 211,000 square feet.

If you're interested, the master lease runs through September 30, 2035.

The way our hobby talks about player counts is all sorts of messed up. Steam concurrents are a useful metric for gauging a game's general popularity, but they paint an incomplete picture. They're a single data point, yet have become the flimsy scaffolding on which the internet builds elaborate headcanon about a game's quality, viability, or deadness. Sometimes dogpiling is so successful, and the resulting perception so difficult to fight, that simply saying a game is dead is enough to help kill it.

It's a trend that annoys me to no end, so it's refreshing to see a developer speaking openly about concurrents—both about how many it considers "healthy," and why it's normal for the number to rise and fall. It's been a recurring topic for Wardogs developer Bulkhead, whose closed beta surpassed 200,000 concurrents today on Steam. Responding to a TimTheTatman clip on X, CEO Joe Brammer spoke on the milsim's unexpected popularity, and its inevitable (but healthy) decline.

"Wardogs will continue to lose players for months as the hype dies down," Brammer wrote. "Doesn't make it a bad game or even a problem, we planned for 5k players concurrent! It'll maintain a healthy playerbase and we'll continue to build the 1.0 version of the game then... it'll boom again :) And so the cycle continues :)"

It's a cycle many of us are familiar with, but rarely acknowledge. I tend to build a rotation of multiplayer favorites that I regularly return to, either to check out an update or scratch an itch. It is, I think, a pretty healthy way to enjoy videogames, but the rise of live service "forever" games, as well as high-profile failures, have proliferated the idea that videogames are those species of shark that will die if they ever stop swimming.

Much like the majority of videogames before 2016, Bulkhead does not need Wardogs to be a consistent, top-charting megahit to continue making it. In a video published last month outlining "10 reasons not to buy Wardogs," game director Howard Philpott expanded on Bulkhead's expectations:

"We expect our initial days after launch to have a lot more players than expected, but we can tell you for a fact that this is completely normal. Those players will fall away over the next coming months. Player numbers will drop off, and journalists and influencers on the fringe of the community will try to ragebait your enjoyment out of the game for social media clicks. This doesn't mean the game is dying. We're thinking longer term than a flash in the plan. Our goal is to settle into a sustainable, close-knit community. If we're pulling in 3,000 to 5,000 daily concurrent players who genuinely love the game, it'll allow new players to buy in anytime and join an active community."

If we put our hands together on this one, we can all be normal about a multiplayer shooter. Wardogs is out September 10, but pre-ordering grants access to the closed beta ending Sunday.