Marathon 2025 - Bungie's new AAAA Extraction shooter

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Leaf Wage Slave Jr said:
Honestly even ignoring Marathon entirely - look Sony’s flat out said PC is the primary platform, I’m already assuming the console numbers are dire - there’s so many Sony Exclusives I want to laugh at that I can’t believe they’d actually approve this.
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For sure, but I think it's going to be interesting to see what the exact numbers are.

Is it 2000 or 200?
 
Zenos Yae Viator said:
the Cager in this is Ghaul, obviously, but the one who "comes back up the path, reeking (of Darkness) Is Savathun.

This is, basically the only written text going over the mindset of the Gardener, we had the WInnower, and they speak as someone who feels betrayed by the Gardener changing the rules, but this paints the Gardener as burdened fool, someone swimming desperately against the grain of existence, no Godly assurance, just fear, and despair at the loss they incur by even trying.

The backstory of the setting was so good, shame about all the shit they did with the various plots and characters, its neat that Humanity is basically the very very last race chosen for the fighting against an impossible to grasp cosmic battle against the two creators of the Universe, simply because Man was spared by a trickster/liar Hive God and should have been, on the ledger already extinct, and thus a complete fluke that they exist at all and are thus un-accounted for in any sort of prophecy or "Destiny" that all the big forces know about.
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I’ve been replaying D1 in between work and other games. It’s just so much better story wise. Missions are grounded and gritty, enemies feel threatening both visually and gameplay wise, the general aesthetic is so clean, this halo-like future apocalypse. So many good details, so many good sky boxes. It’s a fucking shame they let fags and niggers and trannies write for the series after D2…
 
I don't think Marathon and Destiny cannibalize each other or at least effect of it is not that high. Most Bungie fans would be happy to jump from one game to another if Bungie would provide good content like decent campaigns and missions like Whisper of the Worm. Especially if one game's update would be during other game's content drought.

I think Bungie can get increase their Marathon online with WotW type of the mission: something secret, maybe requiring some ARG like with another mission and of course being fun/challenging to beat. Destiny players definitely can buy game just for such content since they like to beat meat to the idea of exotic missions.

It would be very funny though if Marathon with PvE changes would end up being just bigger Gambit :story:.
 
creaturestorm said:
At least half the people in this thread are pissed off the game wasn't entirely about shooting bots and the other half are pissed off the previous bot shooting game went to shit.
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Even if true we're not the people Bungie need to win over. They need something to bring considerable new blood into the game and nothing I've seen them spitball so far has convinced me Marathon is going to see a comeback.
The Doom Slayer said:
I unironically think we're about to see Destiny get shut down in favor of Marathon.
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I doubt it'll get shut down, but I can see Sony ordering Bungie to move all hands over to Marathon and leave a skeleton crew on Destiny just to keep it online. So long as it's making more than it's costing to run there's no reason to pull the plug.
dame dudi jench said:
The ppl predicting the game will be dead soon is just wrong - there's going to be a year or two of seasons no matter what as long as there's a dedicated fanbase.
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As above, so below. If they're using their own servers the game could conceivably stay online for years regardless of playercount, but unless they have some DSP-level whales dropping fat stacks on whatever microtransactions the game has I wouldn't be surprised if the seasonal content stops before the end of the year.

I think Season 2 will be a good indicator of how much longer we can expect the game to be fully supported.
 
moocow said:
"It ... it ... it's not a failure, it's NOT!"

Fucking amazing cope.
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Did you fuckin read my post redditor? I said that in the context of explaining how new content isn't an indication the game is going well, and that Marathon is a worse flop than Concord. Marathon is a commercial failure that is $200 million in the hole, but Sony/Bungie can't afford to shut it down and cut their losses. they are stuck burning 7-8 figures a year in dev and server costs. if they don't, Bungie's last remaining loyal fanbase will turn on them and Sony will have to admit publicly their acquisition of Bungie was a failure. Compare to Concord where they could just kill it and move on. So we are going to see 1-2 years worth of content no matter how badly the game does.
 
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Vhailor said:
I don't think Marathon and Destiny cannibalize each other or at least effect of it is not that high. Most Bungie fans would be happy to jump from one game to another if Bungie would provide good content like decent campaigns and missions like Whisper of the Worm. Especially if one game's update would be during other game's content drought.

I think Bungie can get increase their Marathon online with WotW type of the mission: something secret, maybe requiring some ARG like with another mission and of course being fun/challenging to beat. Destiny players definitely can buy game just for such content since they like to beat meat to the idea of exotic missions.

It would be very funny though if Marathon with PvE changes would end up being just bigger Gambit :story:.
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That wouldn't be a bad idea, if not for the fact that Bungie in their infinite wisdom decided to release Marathon when D2's next update was supposed to launch, forcing a delay while they shuffled half the studio to getting Marathon out the door. They then saddled it with the same three-month season concept that D2 has, such that its next season is supposed to launch a week before D2's now-delayed update. Coupled with the continued lack of radio silence, the general sentiment in the Destiny community is that they're going to announce another delay while they devote all their effort to propping up Marathon, and an increasing number think they might eventually come out and say the whole game's canned.

While not true for everyone, I'm sure, there's really nothing about Marathon that would entice me to play, though. I love the guns and space magic combo Destiny provides, and Marathon doesn't give me that same vibe, to say nothing of how little extraction shooters as a concept appeal to me. And at this point, I'm not inclined to give Bungie any more money anyway, given how they've effectively told me they don't give a rat's ass about actually delivering anything worth playing.
 
creaturestorm said:
Oh shit, i think i remember hearing about that.

Reminds me of that game where you explore a house to learn your sisters a lesbo. Gone home i think it was called?
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Ah, Gone Homo, what a blast from the past. Herald of many gaming "journalism" blunders to come, one of the more prominent early walking simulators, fuel for so much "what is a game" discourse on /v/ (and lots of mockery). My favorite part was when people figured out how little required "game" there actually is; while most of the playtime of an intended playthrough involves piecing clues together to eventually figure out where to go for the ending, if you already know the route, you can speed to the ending in under a minute. Truly peak gaming.
 
dame dudi jench said:
I said that in the context of explaining how new content isn't an indication the game is going well, and that Marathon is a worse flop than Concord. Marathon is a commercial failure that is $200 million in the hole, but Sony/Bungie can't afford to shut it down and cut their losses. they are stuck burning 7-8 figures a year in dev and server costs.
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If they're only burning 7-8 figures (i.e, towards the bottom of 8 if you think it's close to seven figures), then they could run it for many years before they caught up with Concord's $400 million loss, even starting from $200 million.
 
Thomas Talus said:
If they're only burning 7-8 figures (i.e, towards the bottom of 8 if you think it's close to seven figures), then they could run it for many years before they caught up with Concord's $400 million loss, even starting from $200 million.
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I think salary costs are quite high, I just didn't want to sperg out unprompted about numbers when I am just guessing from the outside. but since you brought it up here's a little sperging:

Server costs: ~$1 million/mo +/- $300k in either direction.
* Googling says they cost-engineered some kind of hybrid p2p/dedicated server model for Destiny, i'm assuming they're doing something similar here.
* here's AWS pricing just to give ballparks on what these things cost https://aws.amazon.com/gamelift/servers/pricing/ - it gets into really detailed calculations in the examples.
* bungie has to stand up servers worldwide, so there are some fixed overhead costs in running multiple instances globally, and assume they are able to do things more efficiently than the AWS example.

Ongoing Development Costs: $80 million - $100 million / yr
* about 400 people are working on Marathon (how?? how the fuck can you have 400 people on marathon and d2 and only churn out copy-paste iterative content)
* Bungie, like all game companies, is a tech companythat underpays people because they can get fanboys to come work for them.
* They're in Seattle. Devs are going to make ~$200k cash (RSUs not relevant for this exercise b/c they don't impact cash flow). Assume devs are 1/3rd of the total. ~$26.5 million/yr
* Assume the remaining 2/3rds are are testers, designers sound people, artists whatever, assume they average to $150k in cash comp. $40 million/yr
* Assume $80k per employee in overhead (payroll tax, insurance, 401k match, real estate, perks, the cost of employees providing shared services at Bungie/Sony like finance, legal, marketing). - $32 million
* Adjust estimate downward by 20% to be conservative and you're still at $80,000,000/year.
Leaf Wage Slave Jr said:
I'mma be honest, I kinda want to see them try, solely out of morbid curiosity of just how much of Sony's money they're willing to throw into this black hole.
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It's really interesting political problem to think through. Sony made like $30 billion globally and PlayStation's FY26 revenue is going to come in at like $3.5-$3.6 billion. So bungie being a bust is a painful embarrassing failure but Sony's not at risk of bankruptcy. To keep the board (who voted to approve the bungie deal) and stock market happy, they need to show they can operate a live service game successfully and demonstrate they are getting value from the Bungie acquisition. They have to have something with potential to talk about excitedly or you start hitting trouble with wall street. This is why Meta spent billions on Metaverse development, they had to have an exciting growth narrative that wasn't "monetize the shit out of boomers by stuffing facebook with ads for another ten years then the plane crashes into the mountain". Fairgame$ is going to be Concord 3 or 4 or whatever. Bungie got Sony to kill its other live service games in development. Making a new one is a 3-6 year dev cycle if everything goes right. So plowing another $100 million into Marathon to turn it into a team-based shooter or full battle royale is a lot cheaper than starting from scratch. The question is how much money Sony is willing to burn to avoid admitting how badly it fucked up in acquiring Bungie - i think they'll get stuck with putting resources into Marathon until they can come up with another live service hit. If only to avoid the investor lawsuits against the board for approving the transaction.

Snekposter said:
They're having a blast.
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every time a blast-haver makes a post to that effect this response drowns them out
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dame dudi jench said:
Server costs: ~$1 million/mo +/- $300k in either direction.

...

Ongoing Development Costs: $80 million - $100 million / yr
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On the other hand, presumably Marathon is going to continue to bring in some revenue over time, in addition to having sold units rather than refunding all of them like Concord did. If blast-havers buy something like ~$30 million in skins per year (D2 was estimated to rack up $100-$300 million per year in microtransactions), that's going to push out the "Concord-level loss" date a fair amount, and presumably Sony would enforce some belt-tightening when it comes to headcount.
 
Thomas Talus said:
On the other hand, presumably Marathon is going to continue to bring in some revenue over time, in addition to having sold units rather than refunding all of them like Concord did. If blast-havers buy something like ~$30 million in skins per year (D2 was estimated to rack up $100-$300 million per year in microtransactions), that's going to push out the "Concord-level loss" date a fair amount, and presumably Sony would enforce some belt-tightening when it comes to headcount.
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This is why Marathon's low initial sales was so deadly. Even if all 1.2 million users bought a years worth of battlepasses, that's only $48 million so the game is running at a loss. They needed to sell 4 or 5 million more units to throw off enough mtx revenue to keep things going. But if they support the game less it won't attract new users.
 
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