Marathon 2025 - Bungie's new AAAA Extraction shooter

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Zenos Yae Viator said:
ARC probably cost a 10th of what Marathon cost, and likely 1/4 the dev time.
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Eh, Arc Raiders was revealed in 2021 as a coop third person shooter. People thought it was going to be a third person looter shooter like Destiny. In 2023 they changed it to an Extraction shooter.

So it obviously was cheaper than Marathon but they still took 4 years to develop the game and we don't even know if they were working on it longer than that. According to Google it began development in 2018.

So that's 7 years of dev time.

Marathon began development in 2019
 
Professor Donger said:
Marathon began development in 2019
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The teaser dropped mid-2023 and there already were playable(not public) early builds back then, so they were hoping for a late 2024 launch at most. They could've saved a lot of money if they went with what they had, changing directors and him scrapping core features that the game was supposed to have, like the persistent maps and customisable characters, was costly and time consuming. If the game launched back then and got the same numbers as it did right now, it wouldn't have been so bad.
Day of the Cope said:
I don't know anyone who looks at the natural ebb and flow of player counts and uses the valleys as proof of the game dying; pretty much everyone has been pointing to the gradual trend downwards.
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Live-service games always have a dip in numbers when the content gets dry and players get burnt out/bored, inevitably marathon will have a bigger dip later too, but new updates make players coming back and that's the real test if marathon can retain players. If the new map doesn't get close to the initial player numbers, then marathon future is kinda grim and layoffs will follow.
 
live service games had a better time keeping players when nobody had anything to do for two years, but i suppose execs haven't caught up to reality yet
 
DeadwastePrime said:
live service games had a better time keeping players when nobody had anything to do for two years, but i suppose execs haven't caught up to reality yet
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Not really, they've gotten bigger post covid actually. It's just the generic live-service games that struggle to break into the market. Just reading Arc Raiders description should've deterred anyone from buying the game (live service extraction shooter), yet it sold 14 million copies.
 
The Secret Sauce said:
No buzzword can survive months of widespread use online without completely losing its original meaning. Grifter just means "person who disagrees with me/person I dislike" now. Just like incel, cuck, groyper, etc.
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Notice it's only ever the "non-actionable" buzzwords that get this treatment. People still steer clear of "liar," "fraudster," "conman," "thief," etc., since those words can get them sued. I'm actually a little impressed those terms haven't been eroded by this mechanism over the years.

Maybe it's related to the leftist tendency to invent new insults because all the good ones ("nigger," "faggot," "bitch," "whore," etc.) are verboten for wokeness reasons.
 
The Secret Sauce said:
No buzzword can survive months of widespread use online without completely losing its original meaning. Grifter just means "person who disagrees with me/person I dislike" now. Just like incel, cuck, groyper, etc.
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Grifter was always just what midwits used because they don't know words like "charlatan".
DeadwastePrime said:
live service games had a better time keeping players when nobody had anything to do for two years, but i suppose execs haven't caught up to reality yet
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Also helped when there weren't five hundred thousand of the fucking things all vying for your time.
 
Sunflower Samurai said:
I like how the 2nd to last figure is almost 22k less players than the launch figures
The mere existence of Arc Raiders renders it all kind of moot, I doubt Embark spent as much on Arc as Bungie did on Marathon. Their other FPS The Finals also hasn't had its years of stagnation and middling releases like Destiny 2 did
I lurk on a discord for some niche game's news and I keep seeing this one guy who keeps letting the playercount fags live rent free, its almost no earnest praise of it and instead complaining that "people want games to fail fr fr"
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I can't imagine rendering a bunch of cubes and super flat design with the color paette of Windows 8 had to have cost much so that budget is going to shit like LGBT HIV pozternity leave and sociology lessons for the few remaining straight white males who keep backend servers running and all critical infrastructure intact
 
Disc said:
Even the high number isn't great. Assuming 2 million bought it at $40, that's a baseline value of 80 million.

If you take the extreme lowball of 100 mil budget, then the game needs the average player to spend more than $20 in microtransactions to break even right now. And breaking even is not the end goal.

If you take the more realistic base dev cost of 250 mil, then the players need to spend $80 in microtransactions on average just to break even. Neither factors in anything else, like ongoing server costs or the platform's cut.
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They're not getting full $40 from every sale.
 
moocow said:
I don't think they're getting the full amount from any platform at all, are they?
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Maybe Sony's? Not sure if they apply the 30% fee on their first-party developers, but wouldn't be surprised if they did, what with Sony leadership being a bunch of cretins.

Also, regardless of the sale figures, this game lives and dies on the volume of cosmetics sold, and Bungie already shat the bed in that regard. Not only has the art direction been polarizing from the moment the game was first shown, all the characters look like trannies.

Nobody is going to whale thousands of dollars on cosmetics for ugly tranny characters.
 
skibidi biden said:
I can't imagine rendering a bunch of cubes and super flat design with the color paette of Windows 8 had to have cost much so that budget is going to shit like LGBT HIV pozternity leave and sociology lessons for the few remaining straight white males who keep backend servers running and all critical infrastructure intact
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There's a lot of money to spend on pizza parties and marketing hiring trans influencers to promote your game though.
 
moocow said:
"may have sold"
"shared by the community"

Fuck. You. Lying. Liars. Give us real numbers. I could claim they only sold 100k copies and source my anus, and there's no way for you to prove me wrong unless you produce real numbers.

Fuck I hate paid "guerrilla" marketing and compromised journalists (i.e. all of them). So sick of constantly being lied to as a matter of standard practice.
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That is why I love SteamDB, it gives accurate player count and relatively accurate game owner count and sources that info from multiple places:

- Steam Web API's
- P.I.C.S.
- SteamKit
- Token Dumpers
- Third party crowdsourcing

Then you have these niggerfaggots vagueposting 'erhm, ackchually, Marathon may have sold around 2 million copies, my source, you say? None of your business'
The media and devs hate public statistics because they can't outright lie about numbers and must speak in half truths; if they can't do that they lash out at people who ignore their slop.

Something else I noted that I find very suspicious is the ratio of first week Marathon reviews on Steam compared to reviews of Slay The Spire 2:
At the end of the first week on release Marathon peaked at 88.3K players and already had 13K reviews.
Slay The Spire 2 on the other hand had 513.2K player peak and only had 16K reviews.

According to Steams average, the average review to player ratio is somewhere between 1 review per 30-60 players (I pick a 1-45 review ratio which is 2.22%).
This indicates, roughly, that 15% of the Marathon players had reviewed the game in under a week, which is roughly 7x higher than the average.

This reeks of botted positive reviews, especially with the loads of odd less than 0.5 hour playtime reviews and when you compare these 88% positive Steam reviews to 63% positive user reviews on Metacritic it stands out even more.

Compare this to Slay The Spire 2 in the same time period: the review to player ratio was around 3.12% during the first week, much closer to the average.
 
Actually chud, ELDEN RING is the one that bombed, not Marathon :smug:

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Slay the Spire 1 (one) is PWNING Marathon now. It's like the whole StS family is in on it. This was always planned. StS dev being a former mistreated Destiny enjoyer confirmed. Revenge is here, revenge is now.
 
moocow said:
I don't think they're getting the full amount from any platform at all, are they? Do they have their own store like Rockstar does for GTA5? I imagine they're eating a store fee on pretty much every sale at this point.
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The vast majority of players I have encountered have the deluxe edition or what ever its called, team mates were pressing me in my lobby's about me not having it.

So while they might lose a percentage of sales to the distributor, a big bulk of those sales are greater than $40.

But also, now that I think of it. Match making is based on level and I am definitely far past the average player, so I'm grouping with the die hard. The people most likely to pay more.
 
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