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Marathon 2025 - Bungie's new AAAA Extraction shooter
The description on the store for the deluxe edition specifically included the text that the base game was included. This is Sony retroactively trying to claim it isn't the full game. They are trying to scam people.
I'm going with incompetence over malice here. If you're not used to the Playstation ecosystem you'd be forgiven for not knowing how insanely incompetent Sony's UX design is.
This wasn't a scam. They're just really, really, really stupid.
Concord, Highborn, and The Cube all were "made n' shipped" titles that had extremely short lifespans with development costs/budgets that far outweighed their worth. I'll toss Hyenas out there too, because it had a ludicrous budget as well
Concord was rumoured to have only shipped a few 100,000 units across all platforms; Marathon sold way below expectations but still in the million(s) so there's obviously a threshold Sony is willing to bear. Highguard (assume that's what you meant) was being funded by Chinamen (Tencent?) who immediately pulled funding when the game bombed so they literally couldn't afford to keep the servers up or the staff paid. I've never even heard of The Cube and image search just shows me a Bri'ish TV show, so I'm guessing that's why it died in obscurity. Cancelling Hyena's was probably the smartest thing Sega have done in years.
TL;DR Sony are definitely taking a bath on Marathon but there's obviously some cost:benefit ratio they're running where keeping it up is potentially more profitable than shitcanning it entirely (or it's an accounting thing where there's a more strategic time to pull funding) but I fully expect an announcement similar to Destiny 2 before the end of the year.
Only the most gullible niggercattle believe Hanlon's razor.
Corporations aren't stupid, they are in this business to make fucking money. Even their "blunders" end up enriching at least some of them. It's always malice, and should be treated as such.
Only the most gullible niggercattle believe Hanlon's razor.
Corporations aren't stupid, they are in this business to make fucking money. Even their "blunders" end up enriching at least some of them. It's always malice, and should be treated as such.
I'd find that more believable if a lot of the Playstation Store design didn't prevent me from giving them even more money than I already do.
Sony obviously want to make money, they're just not very good at it. Even after Microsoft basically handed them the entire console market on a platter.
I cant wait until we have another games crash like back in the 80s with that whole E.T. Atari bullshit. The market needs correction. I understand there are other factors at play. However, the video game market is such that right now video game companies would rather have a tiny, yet insanely dedicated cadre of fans who blankly spend all of their money on the game and its various cosmetics or pay to win shop items, than a massive playerbase that spends no money. With server space being at a premium it isnt enough to just have high player counts anymore. In actuality it can be more of a detriment, like in this scenario. If your servers are full of people who bought the game for 14 bucks and cant afford to buy any cosmetics then all you're going to do with your live service game is burn money. Thats why games (or the base versions at least) have gone up in price despite the insane inflation seen in other computer dependent sections of the economy. 60 bucks isnt a price point companies profit from their games at (at least not live service ones). The price is more akin to a Costco membership. It doesnt necessarily make them money, it serves the more important function of keeping the rif raf who cant afford cosmetics off of your expensive AWS servers.
I think it's funny if Jones just copied the first marathon game verbatim with new graphics and less confusing level layouts, and replaced the fast doom-esque gameplay with destiny 1s gunplay, it would sell fucktons of cash and everyone would praise it as a badly needed injection of life into bungie's and the triple A gaming industry.
Heck, I can even start to see X trannies praising Durandal as their new nihilistic edgelord icon.
The thing is, that's $14 dollars they wouldn't have otherwise got, as I don't believe anyone of those purchases would have happened at full price. Some money is better than no money, it's not as providing a "free" "digital license" to access the basegame costs them anything. I don't understand why these companies are so adverse to slashing a price to salvage a games potential. (Well, I do understand: greed.)
I cant wait until we have another games crash like back in the 80s with that whole E.T. Atari bullshit. The market needs correction. I understand there are other factors at play.
We'll never see another crash like 1983, but I definitely think AAA's days are numbered because the numbers no longer make sense.
The budgets have soared exponentially while player count has been stagnant for at least 2 generations --and in many cases dropped due to all the woke bullshit and deliberate alienation-- so we've reached or will soon reach the point where even charging $100 for a 10/10 single player experience won't be profitable because there simply aren't enough customers to buy it.
Personally I'm fine with that. I think the only AAA game that's released this year I'm interested in is RE Requiem and I'll be waiting for the Gold Edition before I buy it. Every other property I once loved is either dead or pozzed, and they've made it crystal clear they don't want my money if I don't want a God of War game that doesn't have the god of war in it so fine.
One of the few awesome things to engage with in the game, ballistics pale in comparison to the energy guns with bounding boxes, it's pretty awesome, wish everything in the game was up to par to that.
Definitely, especially with Bungler, but videogame companies tend to have a "shit the bed until it breaks down under the weight of your turds, then and only then, proceed to mitigate" from HR escalations to AGILE hierarchy everybody is a goddamn fucking retard
I don't know chief, there seems to be enough people and ghost money to keep companies afloat, fucking PREGMATA sold enough for capcom to state that they are really into making it a series, anything that's on wheels runs, if anything and as per usual, little to medium companies will be the ones who will get corrected, since they cannot rely on the parent company to keep the front up, best example I can give you is fucking LET IT DIE: INFERNO (and this is how it works for everyone unless the cost is retardedly gargantuan, like dragathon, highguard etc, even I understand that projects are pulled out more often than not)
Enter the retarded sequel to a sequel that nobody asked for, it's presented in one of those fancy japanese game shows, everybody talks about it, huh, will it be the next dark souls but ALSO EXTRACTION? Guess we will know on release day!
312 souls at peak, retarded AI shat gameplay, complete with clearly, clearly AI driven assets, from the artstyle to the songs, game is the hardest flop I've seen in a loong time, from all of this, you'd understand that the service would clearly be shitcanned right? The service shitcanned and the devs sent to other projects to make money or something, right?
No, those fucking monkeys are there doing their usual PR circus with 4 concurrent players (those of which are probably the ones commenting on the AMA) and they keep getting those "game design director" salaries in their bank accounts each month like nothing happened, because the parent company is GungHo and they have some very fucking profitable IPs, I think they have a gacha for android that prints dirty money, so basically they are paid to fail upwards, like everybody in the current gaming industry that is not fired at the drop of a hat, like the Marathon team is being paid now, and if and when they decide to shitcan the studio, they will move around the more valuable human assets to other projects and the defecation cycle will start all over again.
I close with this though, is it really possible to fail at the videogame industry after enough money is behind your assets? like do any of us see Bimbembo or Blizzard or Sony disappear?
And Marathon wasn't? Outside of being a product™ and not having game breaking issues, it shipped relatively light on content and with PvP(vE) being it's only game mode it's unlikely to attract more players. I thought we learned this with Titanfall 1 and Evolve. Same as it ever wasSame as it ever was..Same as it ever was
Wrong, wrong WRONG! Sony didn't value Bungie at 3.4(plus employee retention stipend) billion, Bungie's bean counters did. Sony was desperate and having a maniac episode after Microsoft bought Bethesda and decided to pay sticker price+tip for Bungie. In fact, Sony got sloppy seconds as Bungie has been negotiating with Microsoft a year prior but failed to entice them due to exactly what we're seeing now. Sony was the rebound chick after getting slapped down lol.
It can still generate some profit, there's still between 9,000 and 30,000 people that are having a blast - and might make more on sales/the eventual full free-to-play.
>Spends almost 2/3rds of a billion making a game
>Pre-orders are low, know release is going to stumble
>Releases
>Makes back 5± million
>Recurring MTX doesn't even cover operating costs
>"Lol at least it's something, rite guize!"
Whatever copium you're getting, I want some. I'll explain more in a second.
Sony are definitely taking a bath on Marathon but there's obviously some cost:benefit ratio they're running where keeping it up is potentially more profitable than shitcanning it entirely (or it's an accounting thing where there's a more strategic time to pull funding) but I fully expect an announcement similar to Destiny 2 before the end of the year.
It's strictly a business/image thing at this point. Pulling it offline now doesn't save them much money but it would burn some community goodwill and invester confidence. Conversely, keeping it up doesn't make them anything either but keeps the small community from rioting and avoids the sticky situation of needing to do mass refunds for the game. Both Bungie and Sony are in a holding position, limp dicks in hand, trying to figure out how this is going to break. I'll give my best estimation of how this will go. >Sony wants to avoid a total fiasco like Concord ect.
>Shutting down several games looks really bad
>Refunds, even for the meager sales, looks bad
>Keeps game alive for roughly 1 year to avoid refunds
>Bungie will not develop any more marathon content
>Seasonal updates continue as they are mostly done
>A few maps/modes get added but nothing major
>Bungie restructures, slims down substantially
>Sony either kills Bungie or gives them more money
>Bungie develops a new IP/D3 or dies
>Marathon goes F2P Q3 2026
>This does nothing
>Marathon EoL/shutdown announcement Q4 2026
>Marathon pulled from stores Q2 2027
>Marathon servers offlined in Q4 2027
>Thanks for having a blast with us, No refunds :^}
My dates may be a bit off by 1-2 quarters but this is what I predict will happen. Everything we're seeing now isn't to save Marathon, it's to mitigate the damage done and navigate the fallout.
I think this sums up Sony's live service strategy as a whole. Whatever meagre handful of GaaS titles do eventually release, none of them are going to be the hit Sony desperately wants. This whole thing has been an exercise in burning money.
>95% chance this wasn't a choice by Sony. It doesn't matter how big of a company you are, if you get a couple hundred chargebacks in a short time it runs up red flags at payment processors. If it ever gets close to 5% of transactions in a given time period it will force an account review. Their auditors would need about 30 seconds looking at this situation to tell Sony they need to make this right. Alternatively:
- All payouts freeze, no more processing while the account is frozen. Eventually the processor must release these but it is held until they know if they need to claw into it for their own damages. In the meantime that cash sits on their books and collects interest. Being a bigger company hurts your odds here. Locking down whoever the fuck doesn't net much. Locking down a week's transactions for Sony is a lot of gains.
- $25-35 per-chargeback. "Not punitive" but the administrative fee for making the processor review the transaction. You can generally get these reduced/waived but only in two specific situations: prove it's flagrant fraud from the customer, or immediately accept it's you're mistake and issue refunds/deliver what was paid for.
- The smallest impact is the refunds that would certainly have to be issued.
- Finally, processors talk. They don't have to tell you why, who, or what was said but word gets around and a ban from one is effectively a ban from all. You may find one that is willing to work with you at 3x the rate if you have a 180 day delay on payouts.
Accounting/Finance/Legal would be apoplectic as soon as they saw this storm brewing. Their one saving grace is this kicked off before the weekend. Assuming they unfuck things on their end by Monday they may not have issues spring up on the processor's end. "We've already fixed this" goes a long way in expediting things if the issues do come up.
Another massive, self-inflicted, Sony L. You love to see it. If we're not going to get a reformed Bungie that can actually put out a good Destiny 3, then I'll at least talk solace in the fact that raping our wallets with their aggressive monetization to fund something no one wanted didn't result in success. Suffah and sink with us, faggots.
I cant wait until we have another games crash like back in the 80s with that whole E.T. Atari bullshit. The market needs correction. I understand there are other factors at play. However, the video game market is such that right now video game companies would rather have a tiny, yet insanely dedicated cadre of fans who blankly spend all of their money on the game and its various cosmetics or pay to win shop items, than a massive playerbase that spends no money. With server space being at a premium it isnt enough to just have high player counts anymore. In actuality it can be more of a detriment, like in this scenario. If your servers are full of people who bought the game for 14 bucks and cant afford to buy any cosmetics then all you're going to do with your live service game is burn money. Thats why games (or the base versions at least) have gone up in price despite the insane inflation seen in other computer dependent sections of the economy. 60 bucks isnt a price point companies profit from their games at (at least not live service ones). The price is more akin to a Costco membership. It doesnt necessarily make them money, it serves the more important function of keeping the rif raf who cant afford cosmetics off of your expensive AWS servers.
the way that the world seemed to work when television was the dominant form of media was that everything was made available to the lowest common denominator. MMORPGs are totally a product from that era. but that was a long time ago. Blizzard proudly neglected the core Warcraft userbase and went out of the way to appeal to casual players to keep the population has large as possible, but when the game stopped being trendy and the casual population entirely left the game, THEN they started milking the remaining players by selling them what they wanted. I think this was kind of canonized as How You Make A Live Service Game Print Money
But... after ~2015 the rising costs of cloud hosting, shrinking player counts from competition, and general disinterest from younger players really should have pushed developers to reconsider their monetization models. but like with blizzard for example, they just doubled down and tried to do the same thing again with Overwatch. But then zoomers got tired of overwatch after like 3 years so they had to redesign the game, forcing themselves into another WoW cycle.
developers don't want to make their game peer-to-peer hosted because then they can't milk it for skins like fortnite. Forget that it also makes minecraft and ark survival fucktons of money too, these people are standing in a fucking orchard and wondering why there isn't any low hanging fruit
TL;DR Sony are definitely taking a bath on Marathon but there's obviously some cost:benefit ratio they're running where keeping it up is potentially more profitable than shitcanning it entirely (or it's an accounting thing where there's a more strategic time to pull funding) but I fully expect an announcement similar to Destiny 2 before the end of the year.
My personal schizo theory - Marathon will have its funding pulled and EoS announced the nanosecond Horizon Hunters bombs and needs a cash injection. That astroturfed franchise is Hulst’s baby, and I’d be willing to bet he’ll throw whatever resources he can at keeping it afloat, no matter what other titles it fucks over.
I remember when League of Legends let you use custom skins installed locally, and you were the only one who could see it. Today for most GaaS that would be a breach of ToS.....
mind you, its cost is always going up, its a live service game, the salaries of all the employee's the servers, the cost of new content.. always adding millions on, this game CANNOT make a profit because its user base is too small, to make new content costs more than all the users in the game's potential cosmetic buying, and always will essentially forever.
That's why you go into maintenance mode - you can't increase the profit so you decrease the cost.
Most of the cost is fixed - the dev time has already been used, the server/networking equipment already bought, assets made, and so on. So you cut the massive team of ~500 down to ~10 or so to keep the lights on.
Again - the point isn't to try and recoup costs (they're never making all of that waste back) but needing $350,000,000 and having $0 to show for it and needing $350,000,000 and having $30,000,000 to show for it are two drastically different things
Why? Because D2 is in maintenance mode? It's a 10 year old game that's shed most of it's users, was it expected to keep going forever? Is the quality still so high it needs a 300+ person development team?
It's fine to be sad that D2 was all but murdered by Bungie's massive incompetence and done dirty but it wasn't going to be going on for another 10+ years even in the best scenario. It sounds like they're going to have a fun final patch and keep the game standing so it can be played (as opposed to Concord, Highguard, Hyenas, and countless others) and maybe a few small patches along the way.
And Marathon wasn't? Outside of being a product™ and not having game breaking issues, it shipped relatively light on content and with PvP(vE) being it's only game mode it's unlikely to attract more players. I thought we learned this with Titanfall 1 and Evolve.
It works? It's a complete but shallow and mediocre game (which some people in this very thread seem to like) where as Concord and Highguard were fully incomplete as far as a gameplay loop went. Hyneas was killed in the alpha stage after Sega saw the incompetence live and in person.
A game doesn't have to be content rich to be successful (and vice versa) - there's a whole genre of very light games that are commercially very successful (Among Us, Only Up, REPO, etc).
Wrong, wrong WRONG! Sony didn't value Bungie at 3.4(plus employee retention stipend) billion, Bungie's bean counters did. Sony was desperate and having a maniac episode after Microsoft bought Bethesda and decided to pay sticker price+tip for Bungie. In fact, Sony got sloppy seconds as Bungie has been negotiating with Microsoft a year prior but failed to entice them due to exactly what we're seeing now. Sony was the rebound chick after getting slapped down lol.
My dates may be a bit off by 1-2 quarters but this is what I predict will happen. Everything we're seeing now isn't to save Marathon, it's to mitigate the damage done and navigate the fallout.
On that we agree - I just think they're going to try and make some money from it instead of writing it off as a total loss via shutdown instantly. Most of the costs are costs they've already paid and can't get back - vs something like Hyenas where Sega could actually save significant money by quitting where they were.
I'm not saying it's a good game or that it's going to be successful - simply that it's in Sony's interest to wring every last dollar they can from it.
Marathons numbers outside this Free Week have been dire to say the least - there is a certain sense in trying to broaden the appeal to casuals, even if its only "we need as many people playing as possible to even begin trying to make back the budget before Sony turbo fucks us."
The only way this game could make its initial investment back in the next year is if through some kind of miracle it became an absolute cultural warping phenomenon, a house hold name for generations to come, talking Marathong Mt. Dew and Doritos. Children's toys and adult merch... this all sounds really familiar. Doest matter if they had 300k peak player counts, it wouldn't matter. 3.6 billion spent to acquire a company with 1 game and nothing up it's sleave.
You can make small passion projects with narrow appeal when you aren't paying 1000 developers to sit around the office for 5 years. As much as people love to talk about how they liked the OG Marathon games, almost nobody knew what Marathon was until Halo. This game was fucked from the start, not because it's a bad game, but because of how much money they spent to make it.
The problem is that doing so will likely piss off the other end of the spectrum of player base, the ones who were there before the casualization, to say nothing of actually retaining the Casual Crowd once the newest Flavor of the Month comes out and takes their attention. And that's before issues re: the games core identity, but that's a whole other topic.
It's a definite rock and a hard place decision, and both options are just as likely to backfire on them, but they have to try something to stop the financial bleed.
