Marathon 2025 - Bungie's new AAAA Extraction shooter

[creaturestorm]

We just have to accept "Concord" is now the pejorative for a failed live service. I agree that nothing else is ever going to measure up to that level of failure again (because it was literally historical) but it is what it is.

I'm looking forward to S3 of Marathon and people still calling it concord.

 

[Professor Donger]

Did Sneedbox ever release sales numbers for BL4?

I feel like people only talked about it for only like 2-3 days after release then it died completely.

According to this article, the game sold $150,000,000 and had 2 million players when it came out. Which keep in mind Gearbox still considered a failure.



According to the article

At $150 million in revenues (minus platform cuts), we estimate that Borderlands 4 is about 60-65% of the way to breaking even.

Keep in mind this was from 8 months ago.

 

[creaturestorm]

According to this article, the game sold $150,000,000 and had 2 million players when it came out. Which keep in mind Gearbox still considered a failure.

Lol is this for tax purposes?

what kind of goal are they shooting for here? what was the budget?

 

[Professor Donger]

Lol is this for tax purposes?

what kind of goal are they shooting for here? what was the budget?

According to a quick Google search the budget was on the $200-$300 million range, though some people are speculating that with all the advertising it's closer to $480 million

 

[Oliver Onions]

I feel like people only talked about it for only like 2-3 days after release then it died completely.

I only played it recently, but from what I've heard the game was absolutely fucked on launch on PC, and Gearbox weren't in too much of a rush to fix it. They just dropped the first DLC but from what I've seen the community isn't too impressed so I don't expect it to move the needle.

Spoiler: Off-Topic Gearbox Sperging

It's extremely obvious BL4 was rushed out the door. In the 8 months since release they've been unable to figure out what exactly they want to do with the game, and the endgame remains absolutely fucked to the point they can't even get basic shit right.

For example, when I first beat the campaign there were 2 options: start over with a new lv1 character or create a new lv30 character with the campaign beat.

Where it gets retarded is if you chose the lv30 option you still start like you'd never beaten the game: no fast travel points unlocked, no SDU upgrades (making the bank unusable because it shares inventory across all characters so will be full by default), you were basically starting from scratch except halfway to max level and with shit gear (and the game defaults the difficulty to TVHM1 making it almost impossible to kill anything).

Where it gets double-plus retarded is the devs eventually fixed this in an update, except they just broke it in the opposite direction so now if you restart with a with a lv1 character they'll have access to the full map right off the bat. As far as I can tell the only way to start a legitimate new playthrough would be to delete your save.

And even beyond all this it doesn't really matter because there's nothing to do in the endgame except complete bounties --only half of which are worth doing because anything that involves you carrying an item means you won't be able to use your vehicle and have to walk all the way back to a deposit box-- and farm the same 3 Primordial Vaults to get better gear to farm the same 3 Primordial Vaults.

It's legitimately amateur hour shit, they're evolving backwards.

 

[Jace on ice]

Yea Griffin Gaming said he couldn't get more than 35 fps on his 5080 at medium settings which is fucking insane for a game with comic cell shaded graphics.

 

[Steven Chapman]

And even beyond all this it doesn't really matter because there's nothing to do in the endgame except complete bounties --only half of which are worth doing because anything that involves you carrying an item means you won't be able to use your vehicle and have to walk all the way back to a deposit box-- and farm the same 3 Primordial Vaults to get better gear to farm the same 3 Primordial Vaults.

It's legitimately amateur hour shit, they're evolving backwards.

BL3, for all its gay nigger bullshit and horrific dialogue, really was a great game. Not as good as 2 and especially not 1 (I don’t think, short of someone shooting Randy in the head, they’ll ever get close to the peak of those two games). But 3 was a DAMN solid game with great guns, good endgame, good characters and skills, good DLCs, etc. 4 is just…fine. It’s fine. It’s not $480 million dollars fine.

 

[Oliver Onions]

4 is just…fine. It’s fine. It’s not $480 million dollars fine.

I think TTW is still my favourite because it didn't bother with the open world bullshit and gave you a bunch of surprisingly varied maps to fuck around in. Its endgame was maybe even worse than 4 though.

 

[Vhailor]

Kill something stronger than you and you grow, that's the entire point of the sword logic.

It is basically an active form of the survival of the fittest. You not just survive, but go around to find someone stronger than you and challenge them. I believe it is actually the Hive's understanding of the "Final Shape": if all weak eliminated and only the strongest and sharpest is left than they are in the "final shape".

I actually like this part of the Destiny. There are some neat lore bits like the Hive hates necromancy (despite looking like Undead-like faction) and counts it as a Heresy since if weak lost then it has no right to live. This causes local Civil war since there some Hive members using Light and being able to resurrect themselves (unless Ghost is destroyed). Also the Taken King killed his son because he was necromancer and purge all mentions of him.

 

[Zenos Yae Viator]

It is basically an active form of the survival of the fittest. You not just survive, but go around to find someone stronger than you and challenge them. I believe it is actually the Hive's understanding of the "Final Shape": if all weak eliminated and only the strongest and sharpest is left than they are in the "final shape

Not just an understanding, it IS the winnowers idea of the final shape, aka the winner of the flower game pre universe.

However, using throne worlds to cheat death is not, any loser should be castigated to the past, Hive Gods lose without losing, which is sacrilegious to their own Sword logic, but they do it anyway out of cosmic legal loopholes they think are acceptable

 

[Jarch6]

over 10x more people are playing Marathon nearly 3 months out than the highest peak of Concord. Every single copy of concord sold was refunded to the player, zero actual sales of a 400 million dollar game.

Marathon is a flop, a big flop, but it will never be concord.

A “Concord” just means a catastrophic live service failure. Though the game hasn’t been shuttered within a fruitfly’s lifespan like Concord or Highguard, a 765 million dollar impairment loss to your parent company and being outcompeted by your predecessor which hasn’t had any updates in many months definitely qualifies it being a “Concord.” Semantic quibbling to the contrary is just plain cope, like saying “erm I’m not wetarded my IQ is actually 72, which is 2 points above the threshold chud!”

 

[Leaf Wage Slave Jr]

On "It's not a Concord, it's lived more than 2 weeks", the label of being a Concord feels like it's just shifted to being short hand for "Live Service that Bombed" rather than well, Concord setting the speedrun, though there's an argument whether or not that title goes to The Day Before - calling things a Concord just rolls off the tongue better.

As is, Marathon seems to be continuing it's downward player number trend, and while there might - and I stress the word might - be a bit of a spike come Season 2, I'd be willing to bet that spike fades away quickly as people realize "oh yeah this is why I stopped playing this", especially if/when we see Marathon begin to hit the "Oh shit" player count where matchmaking breaks, assuming we haven't already begun to reach that point in some servers (looking at you, Oceania)

Barring a complete overhaul of the game - which considering the financial hole this fucking game is in for Sony - my prediction is that Marathon is likely just going to go the route of "We're fulfilling our obligations then abandoning active development" rather than a sudden shut down, and that's solely out of Pride. Mostly Sony's very wounded Pride at how much of an abject fucking failure the Live Service Push has been.

 

[creaturestorm]

A “marathon” just means a catastrophic live service failure. Though the game hasn’t been shuttered within a fruitfly’s lifespan like Marathon or Highguard,

I accept these terms.

765 million dollar impairment loss to your parent company

What company? Bungie?

Bungie sold its 250 million dollar game for 4 billion dollars. Is that not what happened?

Marathon started development in 2019, Bungie is sold to Sony in 2022.

The mental gymnastics it takes to arrive at Marathon actually being a billion dollar loss is not within me. Consider that Sony didnt just buy Marathon, they also purchased a second live service game called Destiny 2, pinning it all on one of these IPs for that much loss is for those who cope and seethe.

Barring a complete overhaul of the game - which considering the financial hole this fucking game is in for Sony - my prediction is that Marathon is likely just going to go the route of "We're fulfilling our obligations then abandoning active development" rather than a sudden shut down, and that's solely out of Pride. Mostly Sony's very wounded Pride at how much of an abject fucking failure the Live Service Push has been.

Which I think says a lot about how bad concord was.

It makes more financial sense to keep the servers running and to keep cranking shit out for Marathon than it is to just pull the plug and refund every purchase, which is what Concord did.

 

[Jarch6]

Also, interesting to see the devs’ priorities:

Adding a “streamer mode,” because sucking eceleb cock will definitely save the game! (Tbf to Bungie nearly every dev does shit like this, but it’s so fucking gay to pamper these tards).

Interesting timing as there was recently discussion of streamer boosting lobbies in ranked and I imagine this obfuscates that to some degree:

0:49

Further, not seeing the same name for the guy you’re repeatedly matching into helps hide the low player numbers.

 

[creaturestorm]

Adding a “streamer mode,” because sucking eceleb cock will definitely save the game! (Tbf to Bungie nearly every dev does shit like this, but it’s so fucking gay to pamper these tards).

Plenty of games do this already, its becoming the norm.

Interesting timing as there was recently discussion of streamer boosting lobbies in ranked and I imagine this obfuscates that to some degree:

What are they boosting? There isn't shit in this game to unlock through a 'boost'.

Further, not seeing the same name for the guy you’re repeatedly matching into helps hide the low player numbers.

This is a good thing for top end players, at the top brackets you just match into the same people repeatedly. This is the truth of every competitive game.

I don't imagine random players to use or want this.

 

[Standard Man]

I only played it recently, but from what I've heard the game was absolutely fucked on launch on PC, and Gearbox weren't in too much of a rush to fix it.

It was worse than that even. Most graphics cards could not run the game with stable fps without using AI-generated frames, and people were mad. I played the game on launch with a card that ran most of my games at max settings with no issues, and I was still getting a lot of stutters on BL4 without the AI frames to prop it up. What made the situation fucked was that Randy Pitchford was crashing out on Twitter and arguing with people who were complaining about the stablity issues basically calling them poor and telling them to refund the game. If I remember correctly, he basically said any stablity issues were not his team's fault and everybody else just had shitty rigs and needed to use AI frames.

I think the combined PR nightmare from Randy's crashout, the performance issues, and the increased price tag all for a kinda mid game just killed any hype the release would have had. It's a genuine shame, because BL1 and 2 are peak looter shooters, but I just don't think Gearbox has the talent for it anymore.

Edit: Found one of the tweets where he gets really pissed at the playerbase lol


X

 

[Oliver Onions]

It's a genuine shame, because BL1 and 2 are peak looter shooters, but I just don't think Gearbox has the talent for it anymore.

I think it's a mix of them trying to re-invent the wheel when they already got it right with BL2 and the fact their USP is now a genre.

I'd never played anything like Borderlands in 2010, but with so many looty shooty options in Current Year there's nothing that really makes Borderlands stand out any more except its obnoxious writing.

Edit: Found one of the tweets where he gets really pissed at the playerbase lol

Thank you! I knew Randy was on his usual retard shit over this but I couldn't remember exactly what he said.

 

[DeadwastePrime]

my guess is it stays somewhere around that 10k mark at peak hours, give or take a thousand players to account for certain events and whatnot. if they can keep it stable enough around there it can last just long enough for the bungie execs to leave the company unscathed while everyone else who worked on the game gets fucked over hard

 

[moocow]

again and again we go with this

lol keep gargling those bungieballs lad, they'll send your reward in the mail some day I'm sure.

I have seen Marathon fans claiming that even if it shuts down they will be happy since the game was a ton of fun.
Man I can't remember the last time I saw this much copium, they are truly a separate species

I imagine the (surviving) passengers of the Titanic were probably also stupid enough at the time to insist "nah man, it was a great cruise, and a beautiful ship, right up until she sank ... that part kinda sucked BUT I REALLY HAD A GOOD TIME ANYWAY FUCK YOU IT WAS A GOOD CRUISE!"

Maybe that explains the retardation of "OMFG YOU CAN'T CALL THIS CONCORD THIS IS LITERALLY NOTHING LIKE CONCORD OMFG!!!!!" we see with the ball-washers here. I'm sure there are autistic morons out there who get pissy every time something gets compared to the Titanic because, technically speaking, whatever's being compared to it didn't literally sink in the Atlantic in 1912 on its maiden voyage after striking an iceberg, ergo IT'S NOT A TITANIC OMAGURD! A distinction in metaphor without significance, but that's exactly what autism is in a nutshell (a style of brain damage that results in a complete inability to understand basic shit everyone else can figure out in an instant).

It's immensely entertaining watching that kind of pointless fuming. Also lol fuck you Marathon is this month's Concord, and thanks to it not immediately dying, it's gonna be next month's Concord in the cultural zeitgeist too and YOU CAN'T DO FUCK ALL ABOUT IT! Muwahahahahaha! Oh how my mustache twirls in delight.

 

[The Doom Slayer]

Panic mode engaged.

Launch, Learnings, and What’s Next​

THE SHORT VERSION (TL;DR)​

There’s a lot of words ahead, but here’s the gist of it:

• With the first season of Marathon we’ve created a strong core community.
• We're embarking on a multi-season journey built around growing from the seed of this strong community.
• We’re looking to solve some pain points for players:
  • Making the game less grindy, more rewarding
  • Making improvements to things like the UI/UX, matchmaking, end game meta, playing as solos/duos, etc.
  • Smoothing out onboarding
• We’re also going to build out more of the core game:
  • Adding new fun and mind-bending content: new and updated zones, Runner shells, new combatants, weapons, loot, and more
  • Building systems to make progressing more interesting
• We want to build more survival experiences for different moods, like if you want to full sweat or lean back and chill.
  
  • Exploring more pure PVP, PVE, and PVP-lite experiences
  • Continue experimenting with experimental queues to learn more around these experiences

Other highlights:

• We're bringing back Duos for Season 2 with a rotating Duos queue.
• We're testing some experiments in Season 2 around PVE and PVP-Lite modes.
• We’re expanding the max size of your Vault and increasing faction progression rates in Season 2.
• We’ll talk more about Season 2 content like Night Marsh, the new Cradle progression system, and the Runner shell Sentinel, the week of May 25.

If this summary has your interest piqued, read on below for more info on these topics.