A big headline from Sony’s recent earnings call was the news that Bungie was going to start losing some of its independence as it gets folded more fully into the PlayStation studios network. What that means for the future of Destiny 2 is unclear and was not discussed, but Bungie’s other multiplayer game, Marathon, did come up.
Marathon’s rollout has been somewhat grim, with initial flashy trailers years earlier giving way to underperforming gameplay previews and a very unfinished, public Alpha that created intensely negative vibes around the project. Added onto that, Bungie found itself in a plagiarism scandal that involved stolen assets being used in the game.
All of this led to a delay where Marathon would be not released this coming September. Now, Sony’s talking about its plans and it seems a bit…up in the air. Here’s what Sony CFO Lin Tao said about the situation:
“First, about Marathon, how we factored it in the forecast, we expect the launch to happen within the fiscal year,” Tao said. “But, having said that, this is not a commitment. No official announcement has been given yet.”
“We are now fixing the problems. So we believe this launch will happen. And if this launch is canceled, we need to do the revision of the valuation. However, as of now, this is not expected.”
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There’s nothing quite like a company saying “we believe this launch will happen” to express confidence. The wording here is odd, but this seems to be in reference to the idea that Marathon will be out by March 31, 2026, not the idea that the game may not come out at all, which I don’t believe is even on the table at this point.
The weirder phrase here is that if the launch is cancelled that they will “need to do the revision of the valuation.” But that seems to be about estimates for revenue, not revising how they value Bungie, or something along those lines.
Marathon is Sony’s highest-profile live service game that’s coming out in the next few years. It’s currently going through a number of closed Alphas, ones that have had relatively few leaks, but from what I’ve seen, it’s shown improvement. The overall test, however, is whether there’s even a market for a hero-based extraction shooter, two rather contrary concepts, and where its audience is meant to come from, pulling away Tarkov players, Destiny players or finding a wholly new audience. All of those are intensely difficult to achieve in this current market.
Will Marathon face another delay? Sony certainly does not seem to be ruling it out. One issue with Marathon is that the game was more or less rebooted under a new director, Joe Ziegler, so the current version is about only two years of work, even if the game has technically been in development for five. It almost certainly needs all the time it can get, and if I were Sony, I wouldn’t worry too much about lost revenue from being outside the fiscal year. It’s going to need to cultivate a lot more potential sales for that to even matter.
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