The future of Marathon after the last month or so feels rather unsteady, but in a new SIE presentation, Sony is reinforcing that it’s an important game in its lineup, and it’s projecting confidence.
Sony’s Herman Hulst took some time during his overview of PlayStation’s offerings to single Marathon out as “an innovative and bold take on the extraction shooter genre.” This was joined by a slide that under the banner “FY25 Focus,” which said that there is “Strong early engagement for Bungie’s bold and innovative new title.”
If you’ve been following the saga of Marathon, all this is a bit eyebrow-raising.
For starters, at least the presentation reinforces a window for Marathon, Fiscal Year 2025, in a time when most players believe it will be delayed out of its current September 23, 2025 release date. FY25 ends in March 2026, so it would not be something huge like a year delay. Even six months is pushing it, so if there is one, it would not be all that long, and you would wonder what might be able to be changed or fixed in that time.
That leads to the next aspect of this, this supposed “strong engagement.” Sure, there’s been strong engagement, but that consists of a lot of negativity about its gameplay reveal, then an overwhelming sense that the Closed Alpha was underwhelming, then an industry-wide scandal where it was revealed that plagiarized art had made it through the game’s pipeline over a number of years and had ended up in the game itself. So yes, there was “engagement.”
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Either Sony is completely divorced from the online conversation surrounding Marathon, or they see where things are headed and feel forced to project strength regardless. Saying nothing about Marathon or waffling on it here would do nothing to help them or the game so of course, yes, you say you believe in the game, even if you’re dancing around what’s actually happening by bragging about “engagement.” But internally, even Bungie is extremely concerned about where things are, and where things are going from here.
The chart of Sony’s live service prospects is bleak. There’s no real getting around that. It considers its eternal baseball game, The Show, a live service. Destiny 2 has been bleeding players and is now entering a very risky new era that seems unlikely to return the game to its glory days. Marathon is on the edge of oblivion at this point. It’s hilarious they’re even saying Fairgames is still actually coming out. The unequivocal bright spot here is Helldivers 2, which has been true since it launched. But its developer, Arrowhead, will not be working with Sony for its next game.
Over the course of the past two months, I have arrived at the conclusion that Marathon is just not going to work. The vibes are awful, the problems with the game are mostly etched in stone, and now we have an art theft scandal on top of that. I do expect a delay to be announced, but it won’t be lengthy, and I do not believe this is going to be the release that both Sony and Bungie need, whatever they’re saying in their slideshow.
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