- Joined
- 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
- Start date
-
🏰 The Fediverse is up. If you know, you know.
-
Want to keep track of this thread?
Accounts can bookmark posts, watch threads for updates, and jump back to where you stopped reading.
Create account
- Joined
- 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.
- Joined
- 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.
- Joined
- 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!
- Joined
- 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.
- Joined
- 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.
- Joined
- Nov 26, 2024
Beg for forgiveness/money from Sony to start another project with the promise of not fumbling it this time
Sony didn't buy Bungie for their talent. The real investment was for their IP's and proprietary technologies(game engine, MTX models). That's why despite allowing them to be relatively autonomous as a studio, Sony built a integration clause into the purchase contract. As Bungie has missed profitability targets Sony has been putting more and more of their own staff into Bungie's management teams. A complete takeover is not out of the question and it wouldn't cause Marathon or destiny to immediately shut down, as Sony would keep 5-10% of the team to maintain both while they decide what to do long term.
Vicarious visions, bloober team, cliffhanger games, Toys for Bob are recent cases I can remember. This happens constantly in the games industry as satellite studios get acquired and either spun off or restructured. The studios don't have to make flops either, it's just part of the business. Firewalk studio with Concord was kinda unique as after Concord failed they had nothing to offer in terms of IP, technology or talent so Sony just dissolved them and liquidated their assets to recoup costs.
- Joined
- Dec 20, 2019
I think at least one, possibly both, of Activision and Microsoft are graveyards of acquired studios.
- Joined
- Jun 29, 2025
Sounds real as fuck.
I remember at one point Microsoft buying up studios left and right and then basically never doing anything with them, like Rare.
- Joined
- Nov 26, 2024
It's not an unlikely outcome at this point. Which makes me curious. Out of the two of us who have played, you clearly like it more and I'm clearly still in the destiny camp. Do you think it would be better for Bungie to continue what they're doing with Marathon? Or would you rather Sony just take the IPs from them and do something else(likely giving it to another dev to maintain/fix)? The second option leaves the future more uncertain but at least Bungie wouldn't be at the helm so there's that silver lining.
- Joined
- Jun 29, 2025
Another long rant where I somehow stumbled into a personal realization:
Do I think Bungie should keep doing what they're doing with Marathon? No, not at all.
The thing is....
Console players never really got their own version of Tarkov. Based on how ARC raiders performed, there's clearly an audience that's been waiting for that kind of experience or at least something adjacent to it.
At the same time, there are plenty of people interested in Escape from Tarkov who are put off by how hardcore and inaccessible it can be.
There is also a very loud majority of people who wanted to kick back and shoot at aliens in a safe single player setting.
Bungie understands console FPS design better than most studios when they're operating at their best. There was a very real opportunity here with Marathon with a clear gap in the market.
Instead, what we got was a version of Tarkov that feels simultaneously shallower and more competitive than the original, also uglier according to some. The audience it was supposedly built for seems to have rejected it entirely.
Still, the market gap exists and is ready to be exploited.
A problem I personally have with the game is that while I do really enjoy the pvp, the game isn't worth playing for the pvp alone. Killing other players is all well and good, but getting killed totally slams the breaks on your enjoyment. I've actually went back and started playing Titanfall 2 again, its basically the same type of game play but a better experience win or lose. Marathon is at it's peak when you completely stomp out a lobby, do all the raid events, and leave with a back pack full of loot.
At least a dozen other players need to have their hopes dashed and dreams shattered for 3 other people to experience the game at it's best. This is not a sustainable practice or a daily reality for most players. I'm 100% certain that Bungie does not realize that this is the core issue of the game, every match ends with clear winners and clear losers. The winners stay winning and the losers stay quitting.
I don't think Bungie can twist this game into what people have been wanting, because they don't know what the problems actually are. I'm also pretty certain that they have the next 9 months worth of content in a near finished state that they cant help but release in time.
By the time they can actually pivot and turn the game into something people might want to play, it will have been too late.
I don't think any other developer would do better if put into their position. Extraction shooter games aren't simple, i don't see how any one could just jump in a fix the situation. So far every extraction shooter released so far, with the exception of hunt to my knowledge, has undergone some kind of identity crisis.
For example: some times its as if the developers think Tarkov is a milsim, other times they think its an arena shooter, and other times they think it's an arcade shooter.
I don't think any developer has really figured these games out yet. The genre still feels like a series of experiments. Updates and changes are mostly a lot of swings and misses with only the occaisonal hit.
I'm starting to think that maybe this genre is just a mistake. Maybe games like Day Z were never meant for the main stream.
I Still think were going to get some kind of really weird S3 rebuild or some kind of total change up to the game play loop, but I've never said it's going to be the answer to all their problems. I think the best they can hope for is to limp this thing along while avoiding layoffs.
I think for the long term health of the game they need to take some serious design choices from Hell Divers 2 and Arc Raiders. They need an actual PvPvE focused extraction game about killing waves of Phor and Sphit aboard the actual Marathon, one that rewards communication and cooperation over player killing, but has player killing as an option if not encouraged in certain specific situations.
I think another studio could step in and provide this just as well if not better than Bungie.
I think Destiny and Marathon have put a bad taste in the consumers mouth and that it's going to be many years before they can release a sequel to either.
Ultimately i feel that pulling the plug on Marathon or Destiny feels like the wrong move to me. Whatever Sony decides to do, the priority should be rebuilding trust with the players and fixing the problems that were made, owning the mistakes, and showing a real commitment to making things right before they do anything else.
Anything less than this and we will have another thread full of gleeful chart posting.
