Marathon

Bungie

Marathon was never supposed to be here.

It stands to reason that after 11 years, Bungie would want to work on a new IP. And bringing back an old IP, updated for present day, seemed like a fine concept, given how old the original was.

Sure, it can certainly be debated if Marathon being revived after all this time as an extraction shooter was the right call. It was trend-chasing and unlike the Bungie projects that had come before (namely, all had a single player story campaign), but as a side project alongside the continuation of Bungie’s main IP, Destiny, it seemed like it could slot right in.

That is not how things have played out.

Sony and Bungie have ended service on Destiny 2, ending the decade-spanning series on a whimper. Well, a high-quality whimper with a fantastic final update, but no true expansion allowed to conclude the saga or the story. And from everything we know, no Destiny 3 to come.

Weeks later, the studio has been cut in half. Hundreds of Bungie employees were laid off this week. That’s almost the entire Destiny 2 team and even some Marathon members. Now that game has become the sole focus of the studio with no incubated projects even greenlit, and Marathon attempting to justify its years in production and enormous cost.

Even before this, we could see what was happening. Marathon has not met expectations. Its initial numbers were poor, a new Bungie shooter after a decade, not even debuting in the Steam top 10 list. Things have only gone downhill from there. Barely three weeks into season 2 and after a ten-day free trial, it is now peaking at under 10,000 Steam players a night, a platform which makes up two-thirds of its playerbase.

This is all despite the fact that Marathon is a good extraction shooter. It moves the genre forward in interesting and creative ways, but clearly, it does not have a wide enough audience. It’s too hard, too frustrating for many, and even with rapid attempts at onboarding, earlier upgrades, boosted XP, and low-risk modes, it has not changed things.

Now, it seems like Marathon is going to try bolt some of the pieces of the destroyed Destiny 2 onto itself, building the plane as it flies. In addition to its recent string of free kit modes, which take out half the point of an extraction shooter, it is now developing an entirely separate experimental PvE mode that has almost no impact on the rest of the game and is a mostly self-contained experience. Future plans have also mentioned PvP-only modes.

Marathon is going to start bending over backward to attract new players, but it was never supposed to. The plan was to…make an extraction game. A good one, a popular one, but not one that needed to carry Bungie on its back and continue to employ hundreds of employees, saving the studio from total dissolution.

It can’t on its own. Other big changes that other games have used to turn things around won’t apply here. There is plenty of evidence that Marathon going fully free-to-play won’t change things, as there was practically no retention after the recent nearly two-week stretch giving players full access to the game (a botched economy at the start of season 2 certainly didn’t help).

Many have already made up their mind about Marathon. Pitching something like a PvE mode now is attractive to some, myself included, but the idea that such a thing is going to increase the playerbase by orders of magnitude is not realistic. At this point, Marathon has had first, second, third and fourth impressions given to players. The original public-facing alpha, the pre-launch server slam, the actual paid launch and the season 2 free trial. Even if this new mode, or others, are fun enough, convincing players to give it one more shot after all of this is beyond difficult. Not to mention the game still costs $40, and it seems like more and more free trials would be required for those fifth, sixth and seventh impressions as more is added to the game.

Sony at least publicly says it believes in Marathon, where in the Bungie layoffs memo, studio head Herman Hulst says it has a “strong foundation” they are building on for the future. While I do not believe that Marathon is in imminent danger of closure, and I still think it will get at least a year to prove itself, it is not in a position to “save” Bungie. That is not a knock against the game, as it should not have needed to do this. If anything is Marathon’s “fault,” it’s leadership putting so many eggs in its basket and badly neglecting its actual, still-beloved Destiny franchise to do so. Maybe Destiny 2 needed to end at some point, but there’s a difference between that and announcing the next stage of the IP, and erasing it from existence and laying off the hundreds of talented team members still making great content right down to the last minute.

How do you follow all that? Marathon can’t. It shouldn’t have to, but it does, and it can’t.

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