Marathon now has a release date of March 5. No more delays after the one that pushed it from September 2025 to early spring. When that was announced, pre-orders went live, but some… interesting things have happened in the wake of it.
First, Bungie recently resolved a very funny situation in which pre-ordering Marathon auto-installed Destiny 2 on PCs. When I read that, I genuinely thought it was a fake tweet, making fun of Destiny trying to boost its flagging playercount, but no, it really happened.
Now, Destiny 2, in addition to an expected promotional login banner and some kind of cool free Marathon-themed cosmetics, is now listing Marathon as an “expansion” in the Destiny 2 microtransaction store, Eververse. It’s in that section with all the other Destiny 2 content you can currently buy. I get that it may have been hard to find another category to put it in, but again, funny. Though some Destiny players are not amused.
Even in a small way, it’s a reminder of how the fates of Destiny 2 and Marathon are intertwined, where one playerbase is meant to feed the other in at least some capacity, despite the difference in genres, given that “Bungie shooter” is enough to get Destiny players to spend $40 on Marathon. But a common refrain is that Marathon is harming Destiny in various ways. Most recently, I reported that Marathon’s March 5 launch will delay the Destiny 2 Shadow and Order update on March 3, given how close it was. Past that, there are well-established, much larger instances of “theft,” like how almost all of Destiny 2’s PvP team went over to Marathon, which became…very evident in Destiny PvP.
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All this glitching aside, the Marathon pre-order launch appears to have gone somewhat well. For a time, Marathon was ranked fourth in Steam’s revenue charts, behind only ARC Raiders, CSGO and Marvel Rivals. Now, days later, it’s still sitting at #11, the third-highest paid game with two others, Kingdom Come Deliverance II and Quarantine Zone, both on sale. The list is updated frequently, so this is not some sort of lag from days ago.
In terms of “glitches,” a key factor during launch will be whether Bungie can release Marathon without an overwhelming number of issues. Some issues for the launch of an online-only game are inevitable, but there are bugs and server issues, and there are gut-punches that can really hurt a launch. Then, from there, a big question is how cheaters can be wrangled.
So, what other goofiness will we see before Marathon launch? We have a month and a half to find out.