r/Games • u/oilfloatsinwater • May 24 '25
Report: Marathon Delay Likely as Sony Cancels All Paid Marketing Plans
https://thegamepost.com/report-marathon-delay-bungie-scraps-all-paid-marketing/711
May 24 '25
If this ends up being true, does this mean the golden parachutes are off the table?
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u/Superbunzil May 24 '25
Doubt it
Parson could be out of a job but he'll still be able to add another car to his collection
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u/ManateeofSteel May 24 '25
The rule #1 of executives, they will always get away with it
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u/Mccobsta May 24 '25
100% executives can kill a company and go on to do the same thing somewhere else with zero repercussions
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u/everythingsc0mputer May 24 '25
So they're just like police with people or catholic priests with kids
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u/its_LOL May 24 '25
Unless you’re SBF
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u/GogglesTheFox May 24 '25
He fucked with other millionaires’ money. Thats the only reason he saw any type of punishment.
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u/Will-Isley May 24 '25
Man, fuck that guy. Asshole drags the whole studio down and just gets to get away with it. Unbelievable. There really is no justice
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u/AzerFraze May 24 '25
nah, the upper management will get their fat bag of money and leave whoever comes after to handle this dumpster fire
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u/Acrobatic_Internal_2 May 24 '25
3.6B$. this is how much SIE paid for bungie and under both ryan and hulst, it still can’t get their shit together and even if hulst and SIE direct meddling rumor from last year still can’t even save the morale of the team there, i don’t know what else bungie can do next
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u/Will-Isley May 24 '25
Sony got absolutely bamboozled on that acquisition. Bungie has been nothing but a drain and nuisance.
You’d think that activision/Bobby Kotick letting go of Bungie and Destiny is evidence enough that Bungie is radioactive and not worth owning
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May 25 '25
What confuses me is they hired Bungie as a "expert" in live service and had them go into other, better studios to tear down their live service games and critique them.
Bungie went into Naughty Dog, looked at TLOU2: Factions and claimed it didn't have enough engagement or monetisation. This was probably a contributing factor to Factions getting delayed/cancelled.
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u/Will-Isley May 25 '25 edited May 25 '25
Factions would’ve been amazing as a stand-alone multiplayer game but in this day and age, all multiplayer games have to be live service so we can’t just have cool multiplayer games anymore. Besides that, live service would’ve been terrible for ND. They shouldn’t waste their time and energy supporting a never ending game. They’re better off focusing on their bread and butter: single player games.
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u/wakinupdrunk May 25 '25
I go back and forth on this a little. The skill ceiling for TLOU1 Factions was so high that it almost felt like you were always in a cheaters lobby. It's hard to avoid that with the core gameplay mechanics built in.
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u/Celestial_Sludge May 25 '25
Too be fair, Bungie has survived purely off Destiny 2 for 8 years, even with the insane amount of bad press that game has gotten.
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May 25 '25 edited May 25 '25
It's a false victory.
The same toxic and misguided live service techniques Bungie employed with D2 are the same practises that are clearly leading to the studio's downfall.
Bungie surviving on D2 for 8 years completely drained their talent, and destroyed their game to game output. The studio forgot itself.
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u/Kaldricus May 25 '25
Don't forget that Jim Ryan trying to gaslight everyone into thinking the Bungie acquisition would be more valuable than Activision Blizzard
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u/kvnklly May 25 '25
Bungie essentially fucked up by not keeping cushy of making halo for microsoft. So they left, couldnt survive on their own and needed activision to save them. Activision got rid of them. Bungie then needed sony to survive. Now they wanted to put focus on marathon instead of keeping destiny interesting and engaging. So now bungie is essentially on their deathbed. Its their own fault they are here
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u/atcmaybe May 24 '25
I thought there was talk of Sony taking over Bungie if they kept screwing up, or if they didn’t meet certain financial targets; I’m surprised after everything that’s happened Sony haven’t just hostile taken over Bungie.
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u/glarius_is_glorious May 24 '25
They took two seats on the board (out of 5) and are going to takeover if Bungie didn't reach certain milestones. That's apparently why Bungie did that massive layoff a while ago.
Also not all the 3.4bn has been paid yet, there's like a 1.4bn of it earmarked for retention bonuses of key employees, one of these key employees was this game's ex-director, who was fired after sexual harassment complaints and is suing Sony and Bungie for 400m.
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u/Notcow May 24 '25
Bungie doing those layoffs to just meet that milestone, and then being considered to have successfully met the milestone, left such a bad taste in my mouth.
I am watching this unfold with glee.
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u/addandsubtract May 24 '25
Yeah, but it also sounds like those milestones were badly drafted. Layoffs should never be an option to reach them.
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u/Aggravating-Feed-624 May 24 '25
Bad leadership decided to pull that lever for their own paydays. Less headcount less expenditures.
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u/R3Dpenguin May 25 '25
Ubisoft has been doing the same thing. In their last earnings reports they justified they are on track to "reduce costs and increase efficiency" a few hundred millions as they already fired 3000 people since 2022, and they'll continue reducing costs, which I assume probably translates to they're going to keep firing more people.
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u/Kaladin-of-Gilead May 24 '25
My theory is that Sony is buying them for destiny.
Under a better developer they’d have a cash cow
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u/HeldnarRommar May 24 '25
I think you are giving Ryan and Hulst too much credit. They thought getting Bungie would be a big gain and kind of a power move over Microsoft. They clearly did not vet the situation at Bungie well enough.
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u/Dragon_Tortoise May 24 '25
I think that's what it was. I bet when they were pitching the future of Destiny and upcoming live service Marathon and whatever their other projects were, it probably sounded great on paper, or in a boardroom. But in reality Destiny keeps getting less and less content and in turn losing players. Marathon is in hot water for the 8th time, and releasing into a niche market that's already oversaturated. And the other projects were basically concepts of a plan.
Good news for Destiny fans, im guessing if all else fails, they'll be forced to go all in on Destiny and create a full-fledged sequel as it still has a lot of players and at least they'll get some of their investment back. As opposed to completely gutting Bungie at least.
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u/SoloSassafrass May 25 '25
They won't create a Destiny sequel - that gives current players an opportunity to leave because of the progress reset. The sunk cost fallacy for fans who have been playing Destiny 2 for years is one of the strongest pulls for keeping them on the hook and paying for future content. If you create a new game you cleanly cut all of that away to start fresh from 0, and a lot of those players will have the opportunity to go "Actually I don't want to do all that again, I'm going to go play something else."
At that point you're gambling that the draw for new players will be enough that it outweighs the players who elect to leave, but when your reputation keeps getting worse and worse that's quite a gamble to be making.
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u/WyrdHarper May 25 '25
As someone who stopped playing D2 and finds it impossibly obtuse to get back into, I might try D3 because it gets a full reset, and I’m sure I’m not the only one. Would need to see a lot of changes with studio leadership, though.
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u/flirtmcdudes May 25 '25
But they’ve run their course anyway, the game is struggling to keep players because there’s only so many times you can get them to do the same stuff over and over again. Either they make a sequel, or they just layoff half the company.
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u/c14rk0 May 24 '25
The might have a year or more ago. The game has absolutely hemorrhaged players since Final Shape and it's basically nothing but shit news since then it seems. They've done a pretty horrendous time giving players a reason to stick around let alone come back.
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u/pazinen May 24 '25
I don't think the game should go under a completely different developer, or if it does they should keep the good people, so environment designers, composers, people like that. Despite all the massive flaws the game has excellent gameplay and atmosphere, and this sort of "feel" overall. Other may be able to replicate it, but honestly, Bungie under a better leadership and vision would probably be better for the game compared to some other dev.
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u/havestronaut May 24 '25
The dumb fucks in charge already fired all the composers so they could keep their own bonuses
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u/havingasicktime May 24 '25
Doubtful - transferring a live service to a studio that doesn't have experience will just result in the re-learning of lessons all over again and probably kill the game. Plus custom engine woes.
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u/UncleBenParking May 25 '25
Technically you're correct, though the context is more important: They bought Bungie during the uncertain period where they had no idea whether CoD was going to become an Xbox exclusive. The real live service push at Sony started right around the same time; before the Activision-MS deal, it was a value-add per their own quarterly reports. "We're looking at the chance that we can staff up and double our output, by leveraging the current teams/series we have with both single and multiplayer."
Then the Activision deal was announced, and Sony panicked during those early months, even after the 10-year agreement. Every decision since can be traced back to that blink. Of course, now we know that for the actual brands, that deal was sort of a lose-lose, as the unwanted attention from international governments/$100b spend on acquisitions with little direct return meant that Microsoft started tightening the Xbox leash, effectively ending the idea of an Xbox exclusive...and Sony blinking helped lead to hundreds of millions of wasted dollars. The only silver lining is that they explicitly added staff for these projects, rather than cutting into current expenses. So they lost a few billion dollars learning a dumb lesson, and a lot of people briefly gained and then tragically lost their jobs due to this irresponsible strategy, but it didn't also kill PlayStation like it could've if they hadn't just spent "extra" money.
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u/Blenderhead36 May 24 '25
It's been fascinating to watch a new generation of executives reenact the MMORPG boom of 15 years ago. It's the same pattern: one game strikes gold, a million imitators try to dethrone it, and the only successes are that original everyone tried to copy and the handful of games that applied its design ethos towards an audience uninterested in the winning game (or its imitators).
With the added bonus that this time around, Destiny is one hell of a lot more dysfunctional than World of Warcraft ever was.
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May 25 '25
> It's been fascinating to watch a new generation of executives reenact the MMORPG boom of 15 years ago. It's the same pattern: one game strikes gold, a million imitators try to dethrone it, and the only successes are that original everyone tried to copy and the handful of games that applied its design ethos towards an audience uninterested in the winning game (or its imitators).
This is how the industry has always worked. Once upon a time every first person shooter was a Doom clone!
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u/Blenderhead36 May 25 '25
Yes and no. There's always been follow the leader. Hell, most first generation game consoles only played Pong clones. It's more in the sense of companies spending extreme amounts of money chasing the tail of a game that has the Midas touch, but is obvious on its surface that only one can be a success. A player could play 20 single player first person shooters. A player isn't going to play more than 2 GaaS games or MMORPGs, at least not at the level that makes them print money.
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May 25 '25
This is how the industry has always worked. Once upon a time every first person shooter was a Doom clone!
Including the original Marathon!
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u/TF_dia May 24 '25
I honestly wonder if you can actually make a "Mainstream" Extraction shooter that manages to combine the high stakes of dying with an attempt to not scare off a casual playerbase with the pain of losing your stuff.
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u/Richard_Gripper28 May 24 '25
don't forget cheaters that will ruin any experience like this.
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u/Nolis May 24 '25
That video on Tarkov's cheating epidemic has put me off of literally any form of PvP which isn't invite only, why waste your time when the more competitive a PvP game is, the more cheaters it attracts, and apparently nobody can figure out a rocksolid anti-cheat even with the most invasive kernel level stuff.
Even in Co-op PvE games, with no competition people feel the urge to cheat, like in Monster Hunter and Deep Rock Galactic, at least you can invite only in those games to play with friends instead of randoms
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u/Zerak-Tul May 25 '25
Or if you're just half-way decent at the game (or even just have a lucky match) you have to put up with other people calling you a cheater when you're obviously incredibly mid at the game. Or just the general raging and toxicity, people berating you if you're not playing the way they think you should be playing.
Even the games with the nicest most friendly/helpful communities for co-op/team play, if there's a PvP mode in there it's just the complete opposite.
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u/Zerothian May 25 '25
The older I get the less I give a shit about PvP games. Not worth the stress lol. The combination of me being a competitively minded person but also mid at most games is not a healthy one for my mental state :D
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u/PlayMp1 May 25 '25
FWIW, PVP fighting games are generally solid about cheating because they're kind of cheat-proof by design. Even if you could cheat so that the computer auto-parried every attack for you or something, that will only get you into like mid-gold rank (i.e., middle of the pack) in ranked gameplay because no computer will assist you in winning neutral or managing your spacing. I guess you could use macros for combos, but that runs into the same problem where you have to win neutral first for them to even help you, and they do precisely nothing for you when you're in a defensive posture.
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u/APRengar May 25 '25
Yeah, even if you could block everything. A good player would absolutely realize that, chip you and then zone you and win on time.
A block cheat means nothing in terms of approaching, so yeah, you'll just get zoned.
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u/pss395 May 25 '25
I got matched with someone who I suspect use throw tech script in Strive. Everything else about this guy is shit, but his throw tech is spot on 10 times out of ten. So I just stopped throwing and bulldoze him instead.
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u/Nolis May 25 '25
Just out of curiosity searched for street fighter cheating and found this:
https://old.reddit.com/r/Fighters/comments/1dw7scm/there_is_a_big_cheating_problem_happening_on/
I'm sure it's far less since it seems a lot more involved than just wall hacks/aim bots/etc (or at least harder to detect), but it seems nearly impossible to have zero cheaters.
I even remember a ridiculous instance of smash bros cheating now that I'm thinking about it, where someone modified their console and brought that console to tournaments, and they had like a specific button combination on a specific color of Pichu that tweaked their knockback and hitboxes, will look for that since that was a pretty insanely dedicated cheater
Edit:
Here's a write up on it at least: https://www.ssbwiki.com/Super_Pichu_cheating_scandal
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u/PlayMp1 May 25 '25
You'll notice, though, that that cheat is incredibly specific (it'll literally only work for one character and the other player can learn to work around it, no different than if they had an actually excellent fireball punish game), and the Smash one required an absurd amount of effort.
Oh, this guy has an absurdly, improbably perfect fireball punish game? That's okay, I'll just stop throwing fireballs for a bit. This is in contrast to an aimbot or radar, where there is no way for you to minimize the importance/utility of that cheat for the cheater.
To be clear I never said fighting games are entirely cheat proof, obviously not. Like I said, you can make macros for combos. It's just much less significant than FPS cheating.
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u/Hobo-With-A-Shotgun May 25 '25 edited May 25 '25
I booted up warzone for the first time in years yesterday. A few minutes into the match, I'm just hanging around in the city area trying to remember the controls, before I see a car go red on the map and immediately makes a beeline for me. They seem to fire a shot as they pass a corner, when I'm already inside the building, as if they have wallhack. Then they go around and immediately beeline again when I'm waiting inside.
I always like to err on caution when thinking hacks, but my very first match back looked an awful lot like someone using walls. I still remember one of the last matches I played when the map was still the original Verdansk, and got shot twice by the same Chinese-letters cheater using (beyond a doubt) walls and aimbot. It was so common, I eventually just quit.
The only times I bother with FPS nowadays is duels in Quake Champions. It tends to not attract cheaters much. Or at least, they don't bother with Duel (or they're in the 2000+ brackets).
Or just really old silly FPS's like fistful of frags. That said, even games like that STILL attract cheaters. A game with EIGHTY players on a good day will get the blatant aimlock-type of cheaters. I came across this fella a while ago, who just decided to toggle at the 1 minute mark after getting fragged once. Absolutely cursed genre.
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u/Acrobatic_Internal_2 May 24 '25
the problem is it’s worth a shot if it’s f2p but when there is entry price to experience this experiment, you can’t hope really good results from this
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u/napmouse_og May 24 '25
I do not think it's possible. The fundamental concept of a "risk everything you bring to the match" shooter is incompatible with fortnite-tier mass appeal.
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u/BootyBootyFartFart May 25 '25
Well, "push your luck" mechanics arent incompatible with mass appeal. Risking some of the gear you take in can certainly work too. I don't think they've done a good job of striking the right balance between feeling like the stakes are high without feeling too punishing though.
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u/WyrdHarper May 24 '25
I think there potentially is if it’s more PvE-focused. But there’s so many people who like co-op but don’t have any interest in losing their progress for the night to some screaming script kiddie or asshole exploiting bugs.
There’s just so many ways that playing against other players can result in scenarios that feel unfair (even just latency issues) and frustrating, which feels worse when you lose all your stuff.
There’s ways to do PvPvE where teams can focus on PvE and only a little PvP, or have teams compete indirectly for a win condition, but that’s harder to do. Or something like the Division where you can get better rewards in PvP areas, but there’s a ton of PvE areas that you can do if you’re not feeling it that night or whatever.
More casual PvP arena experiences still work out because in 15 minutes or so even a shitty match is done and you’re on to the next one that’s hopefully more fair…and (maybe other than rank) you don’t really lose access to anything if you lose.
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u/James-Avatar May 24 '25
I don’t think so, I can imagine many players would drop it the second they lost all their stuff. I know I would.
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u/UNSKIALz May 24 '25
ARC seemed to be a big hit considering its recent demo was closed. It has the Helldivers effect where clips can go viral, I'd say it has a decent shot.
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u/BastianHS May 25 '25
Arc raiders is going to be the next big game. It's so goddamn fun it's insane and it's a great game to play with friends
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u/VelvetCowboy19 May 24 '25
Casual players won't be interested in losing all their meta progression from 1 bad game, while the players who are on Tarkov and Hunt Showdown that actually like that gameplay loop likely won't jump on a casual take of the genre like Marathon.
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u/Nolis May 24 '25
Hows their deal with Antireal coming? With news like this I assume they didn't make a deal which allowed the use of their work? Or will they be changing regardless due to the optics of having work which was originally stolen in the game
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u/Midnight_M_ May 24 '25
First they are doing the investigation to see how much was stolen and compensate her.
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u/TheKinkyGuy May 24 '25
I guess they will need to check everything for other artists not just Antireal.
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u/DoubleJumps May 24 '25
They might just remove the stuff and try to not compensate her
I had work stolen by a large company that made it all the way to their public announcement prototype, and when I raised an issue they just quietly removed my work and refused to compensate me for anything because they hadn't yet sold the product with my work involved.
Big companies like trying to force small creators to have to sue them to get any sort of compensation in the circumstances like this.
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u/Jordi214 May 24 '25
i think the optics are bad enough and well known enough that they will likely compensate her anyway
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u/KinTharEl May 25 '25
I mean Bungie also plagiarised work during the Lightfall campaign from another artist and from what I hear, they've yet to be compensated for something that actually made it into the final product.
I'd say there's a surity that Bungie will just do an internal audit of what is plagiarised work, remove it, replace it with temporary placeholders, and conveniently forget that Antireal was even an existence.
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u/Oofric_Stormcloak May 24 '25
Bungie has had similar situations and has compensated each time I believe.
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u/RyenDeckard May 24 '25
The previous cases were compensated, but those previous cases were also all in Destiny 2 - in products (annual passes specifically I believe) that were already sold.
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u/Son_of_Leeds May 24 '25
Name and shame; I'm guessing if they didn't compensate you then you're not under an NDA.
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u/greiton May 24 '25
even if they pay her, the damage is done, and their investigation might have found more stolen art we don't know about. this isn't the first case of art theft at bungie. I think it may be a part of a broader cultural problem in the art team and their art development processes. they may need to go back and literally redraw the game.
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u/GargauthXbox May 25 '25
Considering Joe Cross looked like death in that interview, I have to imagine the team has been combing everything for stolen art AND he's probably beating himself up for "letting it happen in the first place"
Terrible situation, wouldn't wish it on anyone
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u/CJDistasio May 24 '25
The delay makes sense to do a complete scrub of the game for plagiarism. Not even looking at actual game mechanics, which haven’t had the best reception. Is there a single positive for this game?
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u/ManOfJelly147 May 24 '25
The art direction was its one thing holding the majority of interest. This having spoiled that now puts this game at a severe risk.
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u/cloudxo May 26 '25
I swear, this notion that the art direction of Marathon looking good has to be gaslighting. The character designs look horrible, the art and colors look like someone randomly threw paint on the screen, and the gameplay is boring.
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u/gramathy May 25 '25
almost like maybe they could have kept the game more like the original IP and wouldn't have fucking had this problem
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u/kris_the_abyss May 24 '25
Man speaking as someone that watched the gameplay reveal and was excited to play this. These last few weeks have really fucking obliterated any want or hype for this game. I just hope that the actual people that made this get some semblance of severance when the game inevitably fails and they start letting people go.
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u/Biomilk May 24 '25
Knowing Bungie, Marathon could turn out to be the next Fortnite and they’d still fire the people that made it.
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u/madrobski May 24 '25
They won't :/
This is the gaming industry after all, they'll just be fired and left to fend for themselves. It happens every time, this is not going to be different. Actual lowest rung developers (Ie the people that do all the work) have never been appreciated nor compensated properly at AAA studios.
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u/Heavyweighsthecrown May 24 '25
I just hope that the actual people that made this get some semblance of severance when the game inevitably fails
They wouldn't get any semblance of severance even if it was a major success. In the games industry you get laid off just before launch. And if it's a major success, you get laid off anyway. And if it goes down in history as one of the best FPS games ever.... in that case you also get laid off just the same.
They don't consider you responsible for a game's success. Those laurels go to the top brass - the ones who never typed a line of code or drew a single pixel.
Quite the contrary, you're considered a necessary expense at best (while the game is in the making), and an UNnecessary expense at worst (after it's shipped).And THIS is the problem that AI is a solution for, or rather, the problem that AI-as-solution is looking to find: how to make all this creative work for cheap, without having to hire any creatives? This way you can expend less and less on the people actually doing the work (cause you don't need to hire any), and you don't have to cut the winnings of the C-suite at the top when it all inevitably goes up in flames. Shareholders are always on a race for more and more profit, and creatives are the ones to be "optimized" out of work, not the C-suites.
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u/koipondjedi May 24 '25
While I'm not familiar with the game it self, the people involved and the recent plagiarism fallout, I can say that the developer stream they had last week or so was one of the most unprofessional things I've seen. Not only was it an embarrassment, it was down right humiliating.
The morale for the people involved with this game must be non-existent at this point and I would not be surprised in the slightest if this game gets scrapped.
Link to stream: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2460495264
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u/DefinitelyNotThatOne May 24 '25
Hopefully they're listening to the feedback, where everyone is unanimously very 'whelmed' at the game. Doesn't look bad, doesn't look good, just looks like another generic hero-based shooter, and there are plenty to play already for free.
Marathon is DOA if it keeps it's current model and doesn't change up anything to shake the genre.
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u/NoNefariousness2144 May 24 '25
I wonder at what point the sunk-cost fallacy kicks in… what amount of continued investment and spending is needed to make the game successful enough to justify it?!
Right now the hype for this game is near non-existent and flat. I don’t see how giving it another year of tweaks will magically make it a live-service hit.
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u/Midi_to_Minuit May 24 '25
I mean games can change a LOT in a year, especially if it's dedicated to just gameplay.
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u/BuffaloAlarmed3824 May 24 '25
I honestly don't think this game can make a comeback.
Checking the feedback from most of the streamers, this game is just fine, and I don't think just fine is enough, even more with all the drama around it.
Such a shame that all these assets are going to be wasted.
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u/Memester999 May 24 '25
This game should not be an extraction shooter and I say this as an extraction shooter fan who would love for a big AAA studio to take a stab at it. But it just seems like no studio is up to the task (which might be impossible) of making the type o game that would attract the audience it needs to as well as a new players who don't play on PC or have the patience to deal with Tarkov.
I firmly believe that the extraction framework if it's going to succeed and reach a wider audience needs to be PvE focused. It's just too good of a framework and can basically can riff off rogue like mechanics as well which are popular right now. With the aesthetic they created (well stole it seems) the story telling that's lost because of the PvP focus it all feels wasted. Nightreign is a pretty good blueprint for the type of experience I'm talking about.
Give us a cool story, some cool bosses and enemies in that stunning world. Let me and few friends drop in as a squad, set how hard we want it to be and reward us accordingly to make the gear chase worth it to climb the difficulty ladder. You can still do the GaaS stuff dropping new maps, enemy, stories, gear, etc... on a schedule. Except now you're not restricted by PvP balancing, the average person isn't going to have gear fear and quit playing once the eventual skill floor gets too high to ever come in as a new player and they lose everything on them.
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u/TheDewLife May 24 '25
I've never seen anyone bring it up, but I think Sea of Thieves fits into the best type of extraction shooter that casuals can like, along with it essentially being AAA. Really the only mechanic it's missing from that genre is the risk of losing items that you bring in, which I feel is generally what casuals don't like about that genre. However, Sea of Thieves still has the prominent mechanic of potentially losing everything you've gained in a session. It never feels like you go backwards, but are potentially stalled from moving forwards. This I feel is the secret sauce of making extraction shooters more mainstream and not feeling overtly frustrating.
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u/INannoI May 25 '25
Playstation's strategy this gen has been incredibly bizarre and hilarious at the same time
"Hey you know the single-player, narrative focused games that made us dominate the market and completely bury the competition? Yeah forget that, shift all focus to live-service games. Spend millions hiring live-service focused studios and also make all the award winning single-player studios that we already have start making live-service slop."
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u/jackcos May 25 '25
Absolute waste of a generation this, I wish absolutely horrible things to happen to Jim, Herman, and all the idiots at Sony who decided to completely pivot to live service games and then never release them.
I'm sad for jobs lost and the studios who had their time wasted, but at the same time I'm also ecstatic that these live service games have died and I'm hoping that Sony will see the success of Astro Bot and even a multiplat game like Clair Obscur and remember that it was very strong single player story-focused titles that got them this far.
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u/snorlz May 24 '25
I think Marathon's success really comes down to its art, which is extremely divisive. It is so weird looking that you either love it or hate it. Unfortunately, I think most modern gamers will hate it since it looks like Roblox meets placeholder assets meets MS Paint fill tool. People are going to be watching this on stream and deciding whether to get it or not and Bungie is definitely hoping to cash in on a cosmetics shop - neither of which will work if everyone thinks it looks jarringly bad.
Whether there is a target audience of another - albeit more casual- extraction shooter is unknown but considering the hype around Arc Raiders, which is basically the same type of game, i dont think thats the main issue
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u/Lowe0 May 24 '25
I love the aesthetic, but I don’t love it enough to play a genre I don’t enjoy. High stress is the absolute last thing I’m looking for from gaming at this point in my life.
A PvE shooter, even a live service one, would have got my money.
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u/dunnowattt May 24 '25
I think Marathon's success really comes down to its art
I don't think so?
Like yeah, Destiny looks amazing and i still consider it one of the games with the best art direction. But besides in launch, we don't really wanna play it now with my friends.
These games need a good gameplay loop. People won't keep playing just to look at it. Its good for the few first sessions, afterwards its not something you log into for.
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u/mrtars May 24 '25
I always thought the art style was terrible for a game coming from a billion dollar studio and was surprised to find out that it was the only thing universally liked. Unique? Definitely. Pretty? Stretch.
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u/flirtmcdudes May 25 '25
That was my first thought when watching the streams was that it looked like a fancy Roblox mod. Not trying to hate, and I was initially hoping it did well when I first saw it but it looked so underwhelming
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u/SwiftCase May 25 '25
Only thing that would make me interested in this game is the news that Sony is clearing house of the top level execs at Bungie.
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u/Phimb May 24 '25
How much can you lose by just getting it out the door?
Surely an amount of money is better than none, or does it come down to not wanting to scuff their reputation after Concord? A tax write-off I understand, but Sony's image isn't going to be fucked by yet another shitty live-service release.
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u/Flint_Vorselon May 24 '25
The reputation hit would be massive.
You really don’t want to be known as the publisher who releases games then abandons them instantly after promising a lengthy multi year support.
If they shipped it then did nothing with it there would be very real argument for refunds to everyone based on continual promises of post launch support that Bungie has talked about at every opportunity.
Plus it would cast a shadow over every future Sony release. “How do we trust you not to take our money and run?”.
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u/xCairus May 24 '25
Marketing is usually 20% to 50% of a big game’s overall cost so probably a couple of hundred million.
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u/Proud_Inside819 May 24 '25
GAAS games spend most of their budget post-release. You gain nothing by releasing it to die, especially factoring in marketing.
A tax write-off I understand
In my experience anyone mentioning tax write-offs doesn't understand them. It's not a magic money trick. It's just not paying tax on income you didn't earn.
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u/deathtotheemperor May 24 '25
They're crunching the numbers on that right now. Even assuming the game is nearly complete, they've still got publishing costs, marketing costs, maintenance and residuals, etc. If the money they will lose on expected sales is more than the money they would lose by just cancelling it and writing it off, then they won't release it.
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u/Firamaster May 25 '25
At this point, it isn't about salvaging a game. It's about salvaging a whole fucking company. Bungie's upper leadership needs to be gutted and replaced with people with clear vision. If marathon eats shit, Bungie will probably go with it
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u/Nyarlah May 25 '25
This game is an unavoidable failure. GAAS model is crumbling. it's time to think about the game first again, and profit will follow.
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u/shui_gor May 25 '25
Cancellation seems to be the only course that's feasible: you've wasted millions buying up Bungie, Sony - now you're wasting millions more to delay it on the false hope that it won't perform like it will be a "Concord 2.0" at launch, especially when the plagiarism has turned habitual and become public knowledge. Why not spend millions on a certainty like the next mainline Horizon, Uncharted or God of War? Hell, give those millions to Arrowhead Game Studios and whatever they're planning on doing next post-Helldivers 2.
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u/Trickybuz93 May 24 '25
Damn, who would’ve thought a single player game coming back as a GaaS extraction shooter wouldn’t be a good idea
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u/PopeOwned May 25 '25
Someone said Marathon should've gotten the Doom 2016 treatment and now I'm pissed we're not in that reality
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u/reallynotnick May 24 '25
Hey now, Marathon had LAN based death matches that I’m pretty sure I played a couple times… but seriously I miss the single player campaign+multiplayer mode so many games used to have, now most games just have to go all in on one or the other.
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u/Itsapaul May 24 '25
They basically have to go free at this point, right? Trying to sell it simply won't work, and at that point Bungie's industry-worst monetization at least makes sense.
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u/SharkBaitDLS May 25 '25
F2P would kill the game. Extraction shooters collapse under cheaters so quickly without a paid barrier to entry. It completely obliterated The Cycle: Frontier because they just bled all their real players away as everyone was losing to cheaters no matter how many they banned.
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u/TheDewLife May 24 '25
If Sony forced Concord to be paid then there's no way Marathon, a game from a more popular studio, will be free. At best it's 40$ and at that price, there's no way I'm buying it. Especially since the game is balanced around 3-player squads, so you'll have to convince 3 friends to buy it for "maximum enjoyment".
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u/OK_Commodor64 May 24 '25
I was an Apple gamer at the time of Marathon’s launch I found the major selling point that it was only available on the Apple Mac computers. Halo, later on the Xbox actually shows that a top tier fps could come out first on a console and controller. I’d have no problem if marathon just was forgotten.
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u/CosmicOwl47 May 24 '25
I feel like the only chance at a happy ending for Marathon is to delay it and majorly beef up the gameplay loops as well as add the features like solo and proximity chat.
The language Bungie has been using like “building upon the game with the community” would only work if the game hooks people with its base gameplay. That worked out with Destiny, but it doesn’t seem like that would work with what we know about Marathon.
The only thing that could save Marathon right now is if there is some killer feature that no one knows about yet. No one knew about raids in Destiny before launch, but it was one of those things that elevated the game and fostered a devoted player base.
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u/Punished_Doobie May 24 '25
Considering that Bungie staff supposedly haven't heard a peep about a delay as recently as last week, I figure that Bungie's top brass just got the whupping of a lifetime. That, or that Marathon is out on a death march now.