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- Feb 16, 2021
Marathon is obviously a failure, but so was Anthem and it stayed online for almost 10 years. Why are you so determined to start fights with people in the thread this week?
Marathon 2025 - Bungie's new AAAA Extraction shooter
- Thread starter ScurvyRat
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- Jan 15, 2019
Amazing. Even agreeing with me you're still looking for a fight. Grab a mirror as and repeat the question, lad; you're the person who needs asking.
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- Feb 16, 2021
I'm not agreeing with you, I'm trying to help you understand that pointing out Marathon isn't going offline any time soon isn't the same as saying it's a success.
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- Nov 17, 2022
Yeah, and I’m legitimately convinced they just forgot Anthem was still up and running, considering how it hadn’t received an update in God only knows how long - per some quick Google, it’s last content update was in February of 2020.
It’s admittedly an apples and oranges comparison - Anthem was essentially a single player game with co-op forced into a Live Service model compared to Marathon being a Live Service Extraction Shooter - and it just makes me hate the whole “everything must be live service, even when it doesn’t make any fucking sense” push slightly more than usual.
- Joined
- Jan 15, 2019
Ah yes, how could we have forgotten the immense success of Anthem? Same reasoning, I suppose. Flopped hard on launch, was the butt of the joke for years, hasn't seen a content update in a dog's age, but hey -- it's technically still alive and didn't literally and precisely follow Concord in every exact literal detail (down to the spelling, because fuck it, why not?), so IT'S TOTALLY NOT A FAILURE! IT'S JUST NOT! MOOOOOOOM! MAKE HIM STOP CALLING IT A FAILURE!
You just gonna keep coming up with "dogshit products that flopped but are still technically available/online and ergo can't be -- by an increasingly strained definition of the term no one cares about -- considered a 'failure'"? Surely there's something more compelling on that list of exciting "damn, almost didn't completely fuck it up" entertainment products.
Anthem? Fuckin' really guys? And didn't Anthem sell better than Marathon 2025 anyway?
- Joined
- Sep 26, 2021
Is everybody in this thread having a blast? I am
- Joined
- Jan 20, 2014
If you ignore the haters the game is really fun. Think about how generous Bungie was to sell it on Steam for just $39.99!
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- Nov 26, 2024
You're overestimating their potential profits based on old peak sales + forgetting how bad Bungie is with money. Destiny 2 only ever made $100s+ millions a year during peak player highs with new expansions/seasons. Thats around 200,000 concurrent players online with a global player count above 5 million. That's forsaken/witchqueen territory, Which to remind you, is when Microsoft appraised them for purchase and came to the conclusion that their "burn rate was too high". That's them outright saying, during the absolute peak of destiny's profitability, that Bungie out spent their profits. Based on this track record, current D2+Marathon MTX is nowhere near enough to cover their costs. Just your example of:
>30 million
>Lol, lmao
Lets do napkin math.
>Average concurrent players probably 15k
>Globally probably around 50k total
>FtP games average 15-25% MTX engagement
>Marathon probably gets around 10-15% engagement
>50k*.15= 7500 paying players
>30M/7500= 4000 spending per player to hit goal
>$4000 in skins per player
>Implying there's enough MTX to hit that number
I'm not doing this to shit on the game or it's players. Just to prove a point, there's no way this game makes a RoI let alone enough to sustain it's upkeep costs. Bungie's at a decision point. They can stay the course, completely bleed out and get absorbed by Sony or they can convince Sony to let them cut their losses and try again. Effectively EoL Marathon, AoT/maintenance mode D2 and work on something new. You can't squeeze blood from a stone, and trying to squeeze two at once is just double the effort for nothing.
It did, but we don't have exact numbers on development costs. Also Bioware was a mad house at the time and money got shifted around from project to project so it's hard to really tell if it was spent on Anthem or DA or ME. Also Anthem got pulled from most digital and physical store fronts in 2023, making it impossible to purchase, after 2.0 failed and only remained on the EA digital store until January 2025. Anthems failure was rather unique affair compared to say Concord or Hyenas(join the ack).
- Joined
- Jun 29, 2025
I didnt realize it had been online for that long.
Again, it can make more financial sense to keep a game alive and limping along if only in maintenance mode than to pull the plug.
That's part of what makes Concord unique, so few people purchased that game that it made more sense to do a total refund and shut the game down than to keep the servers running. God knows how many contractual obligations, support agreements, platform commitments have to be made to host one of these games, and none of it outweighed how piss poor initial sales and engagement was.
Think about how much real life promotional material, physical copies, and other merchandise was shipped to physical retailers. Do you think a company like walmart bought millions of dollars worth of concord copies and just ate the cost? Fuck no.
It was a once in a life time business disaster which we will never see the likes of again.
- Joined
- Sep 23, 2019
Moocow, you're having an argument with a stance that doesn't fucking exist on this thread. Do you still not get the difference between your imagined 'if the servers stay up, it's not a flop' that you THINK everyone else is saying, and the actual 'just because it's a complete, spectacular flop doesn't mean they're gonna drop the servers anytime soon'? Genuinely, this isn't a conflict between you and a bunch of marathon holdouts, because the only thing you’re arguing against is a strawman that is so ludicrously off that the only person you’ve convinced that it’s the real argument is yourself. It’s a one-man battle with yourself where you look like an idiot from both ends.
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- Nov 17, 2022
You think I’m defending Anthem as a way to defend Marathon? I have no skin in this one beyond laughing at the memes when Marathon underperformed, and am now just staring at the slow motion train wreck.
The most I’m willing to defend on a difference is that one was a single player game clearly shoved into a Live Service Mold, and the other was designed as a live service from the jump, making the comparison more apples and oranges than a 1:1 comparison, regardless of both comically underperforming.
This is probably going to be the fate of Marathon, but we do have two more projects from Sony that might make the financial equation change, those being Fairgame$ and Horizon Hunters.
Now, the former I doubt anyone but the biggest Playstation Cultists can’t see the bomb coming, but the latter is from the franchise that is Hulst’s Baby - meaning if we think they’re just shovelling more good money into bad to keep Marathon up and running, then we haven’t seen anything yet.
Between all three of them, I’d put Fairgame$ as the one I’m assuming doesn’t last a year, but with how disastrous Sony’s Live Service Push has been, I can’t write off plugs being pulled - though if the cost of keeping the game on Maintenance Mode is low enough I’d be willing to bet it’ll be in the form of Massive Layoffs and Studio Closures first…
- Joined
- Feb 16, 2021
Personally I'm glad that 90% of the playerbase dropped off a week after launch. Guarantees I'm getting into games with fellow blast havers and not dirty casuals.
Nigger can you actually not read:
- Joined
- Jun 29, 2025
The only reason I cant agree to this conclusions is that what else would Bungie be doing in the mean time?
Sony just giving up on a company they just bought is fucking wild, but I'm not a business man. I guess they could just lay off 95% of the staff and keep a skeleton crew.
Is there any other examples of this? Surely its happened before with other acquisitions.