Marathon

Bungie

Bungie’s Marathon continues to be an industry hot topic, the first new (“new”) IP from the studio after over a decade of Destiny, a Sony live-service offering in an age when that has often been a death sentence.

Marathon is not PlayStation’s next Concord, as it has been previously accused of, and is in no danger of an imminent shutdown. But it has been rapidly losing players week-over-week, and simply put, that has to end, or at least stabilize. Forget competing with ARC Raiders; it’s now putting up numbers that are close to on par with The Finals.

Pretty soon, there will have to be a switch to pursue more casual players. That’s actually already begun with an “even playing field” sponsored kit mode, and a new event that incentivizes players to show mercy to each other for bonus gear (this has resulted in more trolling than friendship, it seems). But will more drastic measures be needed?

Marathon has just gone on sale on Xbox, a platform it has performed terribly on, where it’s down from $40 to $32, 20% off. When games start losing players and keep losing players, a frequent question arises: Should it switch to free-to-play?

The obvious idea here is that such a switch, eliminating that $40 barrier to entry, would draw in more players who may have otherwise been reluctant to give it a shot. It would not be the first game to try this, nor the last.

No. I vote no, and I’m betting Sony and Bungie are saying no, as well. Why? A few reasons:

1) It essentially already did this. The free Server Slam event was a trial run of the game just a few days before it officially released at full price. It perhaps not unexpectedly lost a lot of free trial players compared to its final sales, but now a month and a half in, it doesn’t feel like much would change here just because two more maps and some balance patches have arrived.

2) New players trying out the game would be miles from that new content. It would take a fairly significant amount of time to build up to Outpost and Cryo, very unique, but intensely difficult maps for an already difficult genre, so the “test” for free players would largely be what we already saw, messing around Perimeter to see if it sticks.

3) Almost all other extraction games are priced at or around this level. Free-to-play may make Marathon able to draw in extra players, but games are not free because…they need to make money. Marathon has not exactly wowed all that many people with its early battle pass (which it has to actually patch more rewards into) or drip-fed microtransactions, and those two things would be the only way to support it. Plus, if this switch happened any time soon, that would annoy players who were interested enough to shell out and would have to see some sort of bonus compensation as a result.

4) Cheaters. Make a game free, open it up for way more potential cheaters. And they’re more harmful than most in a lose-everything extraction game.

This seems like a whiteboard idea, but one that would not move the needle much in practice. I think Marathon is better off continuing to iterate on the existing game with ideas like the free kit mode, but maybe even more past that, maybe even moving a bit away from pure extraction with more out-there ideas.

The caveat here is that I think there is another game that could serve as a model for potential Marathon recovery, Rainbow Six Siege, which was on the brink of collapse closer to launch, but made huge overhauls to the game, including…going free-to-play. Now it remains a hit to this day.

It’s all very complicated, but it is hard to see F2P as the answer, at least not without enormous changes coming with it.

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