Marathon 2025 - Bungie's new AAAA Extraction shooter

[Civillian 18]

Is there anything the fucking jeet subhumans won't shit up?

Apart from a toilet, like a human? Not that we have seen so far.

 

[OiledSoba]

Oh that goes without saying, but the sheer gap between "Alleged Units Sold" and "We can see the Player Count" is just throwing me off.

You can usually estimate this type of game (that had ads for, had a announced launch, featured video, etc.) to be "peak concurrent players x 10" = ~copies sold on steam
"~88K all-time peak 20 days ago" => ~800K units sold, temove the several refunds and it seems about right.
They have lost 40% of that in 20 days .. seems about right too because it's fucking 2026 Bungie here.

 

[Astro Galactic Megalul]

Yeah that's why I wanted to wait for the peak player count for the week

I think it's kind of useless to track player numbers at this point, we aren't going to see a positive dramatic shift required for the game to be considered successful internally for both Bungie and Sony, it just can't feasibly earn them that kind of money, ever.
I'm always trying to drive this point home - while it might have enough numbers to ensure players always have other people to play with, and isn't technically DOA, with such reception it has no future. Even the current playerbase, which might've been enough to sustain small development team, is slowly dwindling. Which I expect to only accelerate, as is usually the trend in such cases.
All this despite desperate astroturfing.

People are getting lost in the minutia. It's already a failure from studio/publisher perspective. It might not be as dramatic as Concord, but it's still bleeding money.

 

[creaturestorm]

feel like we are going to see a very quick dropoff in the next month. Not a slow degrade but a fall. Still the weekdays, but man I get a gut feeling that a lot of people are gonna see their friends not playing anymore and move on.

I agree, this week I log on and dont see people. Some times people reach out to me over discord to play, but the people who were logging in 24/7 have stopped as have I.

I'm on the cusp of being at the end game, but It's just not fun to grind out all the factions to lvl 30. Purple and lego gear from the vendor sounds awesome until you realize theres nothing to do with it other than wait for Cryo/Ranked to unlock.

The tasks drive the game forward and the tasks arent enough to get you to VIP status with the vendors, they made like 3 or 4 weeks worth of content on a 3 month release cycle. Maybe it would last longer if I didnt play as often or maybe if I was just dog shit at the game, but that's just not how extraction shooters work.

Archive of the reddit post.
View attachment 8758805
But also, SAAR DO NOT REDEEM THE MARATHON.

I've been shilling for free?!?

 

[regalterry]

People are getting lost in the minutia. It's already a failure from studio/publisher perspective. It might not be as dramatic as Concord, but it's still bleeding money.

It's a net loss for Bungie if we assume the $250 million budget to be true (and even if we are charitable and assume the budget was $100 million).

And you have then to take into consideration that Bungie is a massive company, and they have nothing else they're working on and no other significant streams of revenue. This was supposed to be their next Destiny, and more importantly, it was supposed to bring in as much money as Destiny.

Layoffs are all but guaranteed, and if Sony was smart they'd kill off Bungie and save themselves the grief - they're never making the $3.6 billion back.

 

[ScurvyRat]

I've been shilling for free?!?

Don't lie.
You're an indian being paid to post here. Just admit it.

 

[creaturestorm]

Don't lie.
You're an indian being paid to post here. Just admit it.

if not for the brown hands, i wish. Would of made my 40 bucks back by now.

 

[Astro Galactic Megalul]

You can usually estimate this type of game (that had ads for, had a announced launch, featured video, etc.) to be "peak concurrent players x 10" = ~copies sold on steam
"~88K all-time peak 20 days ago" => ~800K units sold, temove the several refunds and it seems about right.
They have lost 40% of that in 20 days .. seems about right too because it's fucking 2026 Bungie here.

Not to mention, Steam takes a different cut based on total sales revenue. Did they even account for this number in their calculations?
Under most generous assumptions (I think this calculator takes progressive Steam sales cut into account), we get around $26,000,000 in gross revenue with 800k copies sold. Afaik Xbox has the same 30% cut for 3rd party releases, there's no way they're getting their $39.99 from every copy sold there, which would mean another $4,300,000-ish using the same calculator at 133k sales... let's assume there's no cut on Sony's own console, giving them the entire $8,600,000 from the alleged 217k copies sold.
Which all adds up to roughly $38,900,000 in revenue. I don't know where they got $55,000,000 from. You can get $46,000,000 if you just add up all the sales together and don't deduct store cut. Perhaps another generous assumption of more expensive editions being bought? Either way, I seriously doubt it's anywhere near that. And even if it was, it likely wouldn't even be close to making their development budget back.
The more I look into it, the worse it gets.

Calculator I used: https://app.sensortower.com/vgi/indie-tools/revenue-calculator

 

[Steven Chapman]

So, I’ve been out of the thread for a bit because A. Guardian Games is actually fun this year and B. Crimson Desert is really fucking good and fun. I did check Steam DB and they’re under 40k peak it appears.

What are the next steps for Bungie? Pivot back to Destiny? They obviously took most of the team to work on Marashit, so, there’s no one working on D2 currently. Do they do what a lot of people have been begging for and remaster D1 and work on a D3? Do they continue this quest of abandoning Destiny all together for Marathon and just trying to bring people in to the game through sales and events? I just feel like we’re witnessing the last moments of a dying animal; grasping at any and everything to stay alive lol.

 

[OiledSoba]

It's a net loss for Bungie if we assume the $250 million budget to be true (and even if we are charitable and assume the budget was $100 million).

And you have then to take into consideration that Bungie is a massive company, and they have nothing else they're working on and no other significant streams of revenue. This was supposed to be their next Destiny, and more importantly, it was supposed to bring in as much money as Destiny.

Layoffs are all but guaranteed, and if Sony was smart they'd kill off Bungie and save themselves the grief - they're never making the $3.6 billion back.

The budget is nuts. The trailer alone probably did cost a fuckton. There were also ads everywhere, promotions, augmented reality skits, fake websites, fucking real props / sort of ARG pranks and whatnot, ads spamming everywhere and paid shills, oh so much paid shills, it probably did cost as much as the game itself.

All of that shite for the more reaching publicity of the previous years with :

• The whole stolen assets kerfuffle
• misconduct / sexual harassment
• "You bough some Destiny stuff ? Yeah about that, fuck you it's gone"
• "From the makers of HALO and DESTINY, here comes UGLY NEON PLAYMOBIL"

You can't buy back with ad campaigns the severe erosion of players' trust.
And the result is ~20-25% tops of what they hoped to sell to avoid crying themselves to sleep.

 

[Leaf Wage Slave Jr]

while it might have enough numbers to ensure players always have other people to play with, and isn't technically DOA, with such reception it has no future. Even the current playerbase, which might've been enough to sustain small development team, is slowly dwindling. Which I expect to only accelerate, as is usually the trend in such cases.

The thing is, if Marathon didn’t have the budget it had - even ignoring Sony spending a stupid amount of money to buy Bungie - and was just some AA or I die tier project, these numbers would likely be an actual success. But because Marathon has a budget that’s what, 9 figures at minimum? No way in hell they’re making that back.

I’m convinced most modern game development is just money laundering via “consultants” at this point. Who’d’ve thought that Sega would be the smartest fuckers in the room when they canned Hyenas - as is I’m just waiting to see how Sony tries to nickel and dime people harder now that they have another financial bomb on their hands, with at least one more incoming with the Horizons Live Service no one asked for…

 

[Astro Galactic Megalul]

The budget is nuts. The trailer alone probably did cost a fuckton. There were also ads everywhere, promotions, augmented reality skits, fake websites, fucking real props / sort of ARG pranks and whatnot, ads spamming everywhere and paid shills, oh so much paid shills, it probably did cost as much as the game itself.

Knowing the kind of budgets these studios tend to have for marketing, I can totally see that. Because I look at the game and can't really tell where $250 fucking mil went to.
PR and HR seem like cancer on the industry. But it's one they're willingly hiring themselves. There's a bunch of people getting paid serious money to waste millions likely not generating any return.

Marathon numbers might seem decent enough if you take it out of context, without considering Bungie's situation.

The thing is, if Marathon didn’t have the budget it had - even ignoring Sony spending a stupid amount of money to buy Bungie - and was just some AA or I die tier project, these numbers would likely be an actual success. But because Marathon has a budget that’s what, 9 figures at minimum? No way in hell they’re making that back.

I’m convinced most modern game development is just money laundering via “consultants” at this point. Who’d’ve thought that Sega would be the smartest fuckers in the room when they canned Hyenas - as is I’m just waiting to see how Sony tries to nickel and dime people harder now that they have another financial bomb on their hands, with at least one more incoming with the Horizons Live Service no one asked for…

I think it's similar to bloated startups selling for ridiculous money without ever producing anything. Corporations purchase hype, only to find themselves in possession of canned air.
There's definitely incentive for studio execs to milk publishers (depending on contract), might be the reason why Bioware restarted Mass Effect and Dragon Age sequels multiple times (besides creative bankruptcy) and took forever to shit out Anthem, for example.
I have no doubt there's a lot of grifting going on, to the point that actually producing viable games isn't even a priority, with simply being in the process of making one as long as possible being more profitable for the studio (or more specifically people in charge of it).

I can't speak on budget for Marathon, but I can see it easily being more than what they've earned from sales. And this is in context of Bungie just being expensive to operate and diminishing revenue from Destiny 2.

 

[regalterry]

I’m convinced most modern game development is just money laundering via “consultants” at this point.

Fire all the competent (White, male) developers, replace them with diversity hires, still have to pay them the same as the competent devs otherwise you get sued.

The retards you hired are complete morons and keep fucking up, forcing you to hire more and more and more of them in the hopes sheer numbers will make up for their lack of IQ.

End with 800 retards on the payroll who will now need 5+ years to shit out a buggy turd nobody wants.

It's easy to see how these companies waste untold millions of dollars on duds.

Who’d’ve thought that Sega would be the smartest fuckers in the room when they canned Hyenas

To be fair, they did that when the game was a few months away from release, they had already spent over $100 million on it (they most expensive game project ever). I still have no clue why they even allowed the game to get so far into development when it was blatantly obvious it was tranny slop that was repulsive to 99.9999% of the human race.

Also, they didn't fire the CA leadership responsible for birthing the abortion.

I guess they're still ahead of the pack, having the barest shred of business acumen.

 

[Plagas]

I was on the fence on buying it and giving it a chance.... in the end I am glad I saved my money.

 

[TrainWreckWatcher]

People are getting lost in the minutia. It's already a failure from studio/publisher perspective. It might not be as dramatic as Concord, but it's still bleeding money.

I'm tracking because I want to see at what numeric point they pull the plug. When they finally admit its never going to make money and the servers are bleeding them dry.

What are the next steps for Bungie?

To go out round back the barn with Sony and tell Sony all about the future of Bungie games.

 

[Civillian 18]

So, the thread from before with the Discord screenshots of jeets being paid to shill for Marathon has been deleted, but you can still access the thread (for now). Confirmed fake apparently, with whatever dubious evidence that requires. Why can the clown world not have all the funniest things be true?

If this is true... lol, lmao even

View attachment 8758757

View attachment 8758759

Archive of the reddit post.
View attachment 8758805
But also, SAAR DO NOT REDEEM THE MARATHON.

 

[Agarathium1066]

So, the thread from before with the Discord screenshots of jeets being paid to shill for Marathon has been deleted, but you can still access the thread (for now). Confirmed fake apparently, with whatever dubious evidence that requires. Why can the clown world not have all the funniest things be true?

It's all dubious, Reddit Comments vs Discord Screenshots comes out with everyone looking retarded.

 

[Civillian 18]

It's all dubious, Reddit Comments vs Discord Screenshots comes out with everyone looking retarded.

But it would have been funny. If we have to live in clown world, I want to at least be amused dang it.

 

[Pod 042]

I didn't see it posted yet, but all this talk of paid shilling made it all the more suspicious.
Archive/Link
Bungie scores an unexpected success with ‘Marathon’ revival

Spoiler: Article text

By all indications, Bungie’s revival of its Marathon franchise should not have worked out. Despite a CEO’s departure, an indefinite delay, several controversies, and targeting a saturated genre, Marathon came out earlier this month and has become one of this year’s unexpected successes.
Marathon, developed by Bellevue, Wash.-based Bungie (Halo 2, Destiny), is a multiplayer online shooter and a follow-up to Bungie’s classic Marathon trilogy on the Mac. Originally announced in 2023, Marathon is also a competitive, player-vs-player “game as a service” (GaaS, or simply live-service), which is meant to be consistently updated so it can be played indefinitely.
That was the first warning sign. As a GaaS, Marathon was up against heavy competition from the moment it debuted, both from other online shooters such as Fortnite and Call of Duty and other “forever games” like World of Warcraft and Dead by Daylight.
A successful GaaS can be a license to print money for its publisher, which has led to many game studios adopting the model in the last few years. Bungie itself was purchased by Sony Entertainment in 2022 as part of a plan by Sony to shift its internal game development to emphasize GaaS, owing largely to Bungie’s expertise running the Destiny series.
However, that same widespread publisher interest has flooded the market, especially in the last few years. The problem with a game that’s meant to last forever is that once it gets its hooks into a player, it’s rare for them to switch away from it, due to time investments, community ties, and — let’s face it — the sunk cost fallacy. Many live-service games are even designed to reward players who consistently log in every day, so a player who uses some of their finite leisure time to check out a competitor’s product can actively harm their overall experience.
As a result, anyone who wants to launch any kind of GaaS (or really, any video game at all) in 2026 has an uphill battle ahead of them in order to find an audience. They not only have to reach interested consumers, but they often have to implicitly convince them to stop playing something else.
If you’re trying to market a “hero shooter,” for example, you have to be aware that almost all of your prospective players are already heavily invested in Overwatch, Marvel Rivals, or Valorant. It’s not enough to offer them a good game. You have to give them a reason to switch.
It’s a tall order. Even major publishers working with famous licenses have had difficulty getting into this market sector, which has created a bloodbath. There’s already an entire virtual graveyard for recently discontinued live-service games, featuring releases such as Anthem, Multiversus, Rumbleverse, and most recently Highguard, which was infamously shut down less than 50 days after its launch in late Jan.
It didn’t help that Marathon in particular kept racking up warning signs. It was indefinitely delayed last summer, which followed several waves of layoffs at Bungie; longtime CEO Pete Parsons departed the company in Aug. 2025; Marathon’s publisher Sony abruptly abandoned another GaaS, Concord, in Oct. 2024, which seemed to suggest it was backing off of its bets on live-service gaming; and there was a controversy, since resolved, regarding visuals used in Marathon that had been stolen from a Scottish freelance artist. It initially looked like Marathon was headed into disaster.

Instead, Marathon has taken off. At time of writing, it has a Very Positive rating on Steam with over 33,500 simultaneous players, as well as a respectable 79 on Metacritic. Against the odds, Bungie appears to have a solid hit on its hands.
Marathon is a revival of one of Bungie’s earliest franchises. The first three Marathon games were some of the first and only exclusive games for the Mac back in the ‘90s, and can be seen as a spiritual precursor to Halo: Combat Evolved. (Both games are first-person shooters about a cyborg in power armor following an AI’s orders while they fight aliens. The finer strokes are different, but there’s some connective tissue.)
2026’s Marathon is an interquel set 99 years after the events of the first game, on the planet Tau Ceti IV. It’s been several hundred years since the UESC Marathon left Earth’s solar system on a mission to establish an offworld colony and subsequently vanished. In 2893, Earth finally receives a distress signal from the ship.
Earth reacts by sending a squad of “runners,” humans who’ve digitized their minds and can download them into cybernetic shells, to Tau Ceti IV. Once there, the runners are thrown into an ongoing struggle between UESC forces, alien invaders, rogue AIs, and each other. Each individual runner is a wild card, who can opt to work for multiple factions from both on- and offworld.
Marathon, as a game, is what’s often called an “extraction shooter.” Players team up in groups of one to three to infiltrate various locations throughout Tau Ceti IV and must take on both computer-controlled and human enemies in order to grab whatever they can find. If you’re able to survive your mission and successfully evacuate the area, you can keep what you’ve found and use those salvaged resources to improve your equipment for your next run.
That gives Marathon, and other extraction shooters such as Escape from Tarkov, a unique tension compared to more typical PVP action games. Your survival actually matters, as opposed to another shooter where you might die 6 times in a good match, and you have something to lose.

Marathon combines that with strange dreamlike visuals that are reminiscent of ‘90s cyberpunk, particularly Ghost in the Shell. Tau Ceti’s abandoned facilities are all colorful mazes, full of strange sights and narrow corridors, and all your fellow runners are barely humanoid robots. The whole game has a feel like it’s set inside a half-corrupted archive of experimental digital artwork, all the way down to its font choices and complicated menu structure. It’s a deliberate blend of the 1990s’ vision of the future with cutting-edge 2026 graphics, and looks like nothing else that’s currently on store shelves.
That also means that it’s got a couple of different learning curves. After spending a weekend with the game, I don’t feel like I’ve got a handle on it yet, either as a shooter or as an audiovisual experience. Marathon’s menus are a deliberate riot, and while its basic mechanics will be comfortably familiar if you’ve played other recent extraction shooters, it’s a little harder to navigate them than it needs to be.
For right now, my biggest takeaway from Marathon is that it’s beaten the odds. I wouldn’t have guessed at this time last year that Marathon would have a successful launch, between Bungie’s issues and current market forces, but it seems like there’s still at least a little room for this kind of FPS in the modern market.

Excerpt

Marathon has taken off. At time of writing, it has a Very Positive rating on Steam with over 33,500 simultaneous players, as well as a respectable 79 on Metacritic. Against the odds, Bungie appears to have a solid hit on its hands.

>33,500 concurrent players
>Sold roughly 1 million copies
>250$± million development budget
>A solid hit

 

[moocow]

I didn't see it posted yet, but all this talk of paid shilling made it all the more suspicious.

Isn't it great when they just publish the press release verbatim from the publisher and make it so obvious? Easy money (for the "journalist").