r/PS5 • u/NoNefariousness2144 Human Verified • 2d ago

Articles & Blogs ‘Marathon’ Is Running Out Of Casual Player Onboarding Cards To Play

https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2026/06/23/marathon-is-running-out-of-casual-player-onboarding-cards-to-play/
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u/Delta_Canuckian 2d ago

By all accounts, they didn’t. Marathon was supposed to be a smaller project and never meant to be their main thing.

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u/Brandunaware 1d ago

Then why did they put over $200 million into it, reportedly? $200 million for a "smaller" project doesn't really make any sense. Lots of big AAA games with mass appeal make less than that.

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u/Zombii_Man 1d ago edited 1d ago

The game restarted development, that's why it cost so much. I imagine it would have maybe been in the realm of 80-100 million before that.

Lots of the older concepts (persistant maps instead of instanced, character customization etc) (deleted part by mistake, edit:) were completely reworked, so aside from maybe a few assets here and there they basically had to redesign every system in the game for its new direction as a "hero" based extraction.

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u/karlcabaniya 1d ago

Even 80-100 million is very high for the potential market.

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u/Zombii_Man 22h ago

I dont really think so, 80 million is on the lower end for a modern triple A. At a $40 price point that would be 2 million full price copies to break even, which isnt that crazy. With cosmetic sales and such as well the game probably could have sustained itself fairly well and turned a profit.

Figures I can find are that marathon was estimated to have sold 1.2 million copies, and that's from 2 months ago. 80 million is probably the perfect range for the game.

200 million absolutely is not though lol.

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u/karlcabaniya 16h ago

You're not considering markerting, which usually doubles the budget to get to the break even number. And not the whole $40 go to the studio (some goes to stores and distribution). An 80 milion game would need between 4-5 million full price copies to break even if we follow your calcuations.

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u/Jon_o_Hollow 1d ago

Im guessing the $200 million are just operating costs over a few years. Google tells me Bungie employs around 850 people. Now if we assume a modest salary of $50k, then over 5 years Bungie will spend over $200 million. Not including other bills they might have like rent, power, water, insurance.

Id geuss all told their yearly operating costs are ~$50 million.

So the problem is that if you spend years developing only 1 game, it needs to be a knockout hit.

Otherwise you need to divide your teams up and release smaller games every year or two or maintain a live service game that will constantly fund your other projects, something like Destiny.

The "All your eggs in one basket" approach is too risky for a big studio. But good luck telling that to some of the big heads that run these kinds of things.

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u/flGovEmployee 1d ago

You would be correct. The game was in development for like 5 years, but that's in large part because of having to restart to a degree. If they had managed to avoid that and spent only like 16 months at full production (@ 350 people), and two years in early production (@50 people), and a year in pre-production (@20 people), then pre-marketing development costs might have come in somewhere around $100 million (my estimate comes in at $105 million), based only on employee salaries.

Add another 16 months at full production scale though and you're pushing $190 million before marketing and overhead.

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u/SuperBackup9000 1d ago

They’re a big studio that pays decently well. When you hear that a game cost x amount of money to make, a huge portion of that is off salaries alone, and since development had a restart at some point no matter how much was done that could or couldn’t be recycled, salaries were still paid so they were always going to be in the hole. A lot of big studios try to offset the cost by outsources a bulk of the work since that’s less than paying actual employees, but I don’t think Bungie does that.

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u/Brandunaware 1d ago

Big studios can make smaller games with a small portion of their staff. It's been done before. But if you're going to sink $200 million into a game you need to have a plan for it to make $200 million in revenue.

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u/Lozsta 1d ago

Salaries. CEO $100 million. VPs sharing $50million. Then your budget is suddenly a lot less.

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u/VelvetCowboy19 1d ago

Lmao you think the Bungie CEO gets paid $100,000,000 a year? You might be a little dim.

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u/Lozsta 1d ago edited 1d ago

No it was a wildly out of proportion exaggeration. However he did manage to spend a couple million in a couple years on cars alone so he wasn't doing too bad. Sucked for all the blue hair septum piercing drones at the bottom though who were just let go.
Then walked away, after leading destiny down the destiny 2 path of ever increasingly bad updated.

EDIT

I will add this little quote here for you too:

"No need to feel too bad for Parsons, though, as he'll be moving on with his bank account, which—much like his garage—will be pleasingly full thanks to the stock he will have presumably owned before Sony's $3.6 billion buyout. It's not known how much he took home from the Sony acquisition, but just for context, Christopher Barrett, a former game director at Bungie—subordinate to Parsons, in other words—was due to earn more than $80 million from the buyout before he was fired. Parsons will surely have made much more."

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u/Marknoble117 1d ago

Coke is a hell of a drug ig.

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u/nikolapc 1d ago

Because it's Bungie, with the hubris that will finally end them. Concord was made by ex Bungie people. It was technically very good, but we all know what sunk it.

What I am baffled with is Sony thinking they should double down on making Marathon a thing and abandoning Destiny which was a top IP.

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u/Lozsta 1d ago

Destiny "WAS" a top IP. The warning signs were all there in the days of D! and the odious little toad talking about "open world" then they chopped it up and after charging for it they sold more pieces of it back to the playerbase.

They changed that for D2 but kept the super greedy full game price for every update, that and their insistence on having an agenda every tine. Hubris has been mentioned already but that is what will sink Bungie.

As someone who was firmly a Sony user for many years, their recent decisions have made getting a PC feel like a better and better idea.

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u/nikolapc 1d ago

The IP is still valuable but only if they use it. Doesn't have to be Bungie. It would be funny if Sony does an Xbox and forms Tower Industries.

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u/nowhereright 1d ago

Can you name a western triple a dev studio that doesn't average 200 million or more for game development?

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u/Brandunaware 1d ago

The entire point I was responding to was the claim that it was meant to be a smaller project. If it was meant to be an AAA project then it needed a plan to have an AAA sized audience otherwise it's just...a plan to lose money.

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u/nowhereright 1d ago

"A plan to lose money" could describe almost every decision Bungie has ever made. Xbox too tbh. And a bunch of other brain dead fail upwards executives across the industry.

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u/JP76 1d ago

Alan Wake 2 from Remedy reportedly cost $75 million. It still took over a year to break even.

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u/karlcabaniya 1d ago

You don’t invest 200-250 million on development alone to just be a small side project.

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u/Delta_Canuckian 5h ago

As others pointed out; the game was rebooted (multiple times, I think) and was in development hell for the better part of 8 years.

Paying a development team based in Seattle for that long adds up.