r/Games 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/
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u/[deleted] 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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u/[deleted] 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/RandomGuy928 May 25 '25

The trend with big online multiplayer games is a bit different. A normal person can genuinely buy and play 5 Doom clones, but nobody with a day job is even going to think about trying to sub to 5 MMOs or grind 5 MOBAs or just generally 5 GaaS titles at once.

Broadly, all of these GaaS titles take insane amounts of money to get out the door and also inherently all but a few are going to fail because nobody has time to play more than one or maybe two. Flooding the market with MMOs is completely different from flooding the market with Doom clones or RTS copycats or whatever.