Marathon 2025 - Bungie's new AAAA Extraction shooter

[Oliver Onions]

So how long do we have before the game goes F2P?

With how fast the playercount is dropping I'll be surprised if they even bother with Season 3 in September.

 

[creaturestorm]

With how fast the playercount is dropping I'll be surprised if they even bother with Season 3 in September.

S3 release is happening, S4 is the question.

 

[ScurvyRat]

I think it shuts down before it goes F2P, I dont see it happening.

You still think the game is gonna make it to 2027?

 

[Focken Kiwi]

You still think the game is gonna make it to 2027?

Maybe they'll hit 2027 later today when people aren't at work.... oh, wait! You're not talking about the player numbers!

 

[Zenos Yae Viator]

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Maybe they'll hit 2027 later today when people aren't at work.... oh, wait! You're not talking about the player numbers!

there's 27,000 people playing Witcher 3 right now, at this hour.
14,000 playing Resident evil 4

I could go on, lol.

 

[Sunflower Samurai]

I saw a guy in a random chatroom that i lurk constantly cope and seethe about all the playercount and steamcharts niggery going around the game and how the game was actually good, people just followed what nasty nasty detractors said like cattle and that he was having a blast
He just showed his steam library by date launched
Marathon was not played since April and currently uninstalled

 

[Jace on ice]

With how fast the playercount is dropping I'll be surprised if they even bother with Season 3 in September.

I think they're contractually obligated to release season 3 because they sold a battle pass for it already.

Season 4 and beyond is incredibly unlikely as player counts hit the 1.5k range and matchmaking issues occur.

I'm already seeing on reddit Oceanic and Asian players struggling to find matches and it won't be long before European and NA servers follow.

 

[Cornlord88]

Pardon our dust.......
This week's marathon's update seems to have broken solo fill.
It also seems like rook is broken to,

 

[Zenos Yae Viator]

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Pardon our dust.......
This week's marathon's update seems to have broken solo fill.

"See you next Season"

 

[creaturestorm]

You still think the game is gonna make it to 2027?

If they can just pick a fucking direction to drag this corpse, then yes.

 

[Focken Kiwi]

If they can just pick a fucking direction to drag this corpse, then yes.

If Destiny 2's recent player numbers are any indicator, then dragging Marathon's corpse to the grave will do wonders for Bungie.

 

[Oliver Onions]

Season 4 and beyond is incredibly unlikely as player counts hit the 1.5k range and matchmaking issues occur.

Suicide Squad Kill The Justice League made it to Season 4 before throwing in the towel and by the time it dropped in December 2024 the daily peaks were around 2,500. 2 months later (and a year since release) they were about 500.

Will Marathon match those numbers? Tune in next time to find out, blast havers!

 

[ScurvyRat]

Suicide Squad Kill The Justice League

I keep seeing people compare Marathon to that pile of shit, but I don't think its a good comparison.

Can't say why, but it just doesn't line up for me.

 

[creaturestorm]

If Destiny 2's recent player numbers are any indicator, then dragging Marathon's corpse to the grave will do wonders for Bungie.

How quick people are to forget... D2 had worse numbers than Marathon up until the memorial service called the final update, where all the nostalgic and scorned have gathered in attendance for a final send off.

Yanking the plug on D2 wasn’t a mistake. Even when they have 100k+ players it’s still money down the drain. Apparently they never figured out how to monetize it in a way that would support 400 developers. This is partly why I think Marathon will never go F2P, what’s the purpose exactly? There’s really nothing to buy on the store to keep the ship afloat.

Anyways, D2 is not the cultural phenomenon like its fans make it out to be, it’s no Halo and never will be and so it's doomed to be a failure. Any game Bungie makes has to be an absolute home run to make up for the amount of money they squander making these things.

The biggest mistake Bungie made was spending a decade cultivating an audience of PvE players who treat competition like a vampire treats sunlight, then expecting them to embrace a high-stakes PvP game.

I couldn’t give a single shit about D2 or Bungie, but I wished both games could have co-existed and supported each other. This game won't ever be a home for them and twisting its current identity means it won’t be a home for anybody. As someone who played Halo in high school and in college, this shooter game has done more for me than Destiny ever did.

I’d like to see literally anybody else take a crack at either of these IPs, it's a shame really.

 

[King Dead]

How quick people are to forget... D2 had worse numbers than Marathon up until the memorial service called the final update, where all the nostalgic and scorned have gathered in attendance for a final send off.

Yanking the plug on D2 wasn’t a mistake. Even when they have 100k+ players it’s still money down the drain. Apparently they never figured out how to monetize it in a way that would support 400 developers. This is partly why I think Marathon will never go F2P, what’s the purpose exactly? There’s really nothing to buy on the store to keep the ship afloat.

Anyways, D2 is not the cultural phenomenon like its fans make it out to be, it’s no Halo and never will be and so it's doomed to be a failure. Any game Bungie makes has to be an absolute home run to make up for the amount of money they squander making these things.

The biggest mistake Bungie made was spending a decade cultivating an audience of PvE players who treat competition like a vampire treats sunlight, then expecting them to embrace a high-stakes PvP game.

I couldn’t give a single shit about D2 or Bungie, but I wished both games could have co-existed and supported each other. This game won't ever be a home for them and twisting its current identity means it won’t be a home for anybody. As someone who played Halo in high school and in college, this shooter game has done more for me than Destiny ever did.

I’d like to see literally anybody else take a crack at either of these IPs, it's a shame really.

I've mentioned this before, but D2 only got to those numbers due to many a bad decision piling up on each other. Sunsetting, content vaulting, and the constant seasonal churn hurt the numbers before, though they remained mostly steady over the years, only really starting to dip once the overarching story reached a conclusion in TFS. Then a massive wombo combo of less and underwhelming content, more grind (with more grind promised to come), and complete radio silence from the devs (never did get that roadmap) hurt the game almost irreparably. Even when they backtracked on some of the bad stuff, a lot of players got burned and decided to check out until it was substantially better. Then the next update got delayed for them to push Marathon out the door, we still got no news for months, and when they finally deigned to talk to us again, it was to inform us they were killing all development.

But to imply that Destiny was not a big franchise is pretty silly, I would say. It's had its ups and downs, but it's had millions of players over the years, and many of them turned out once more for the last update. It had a unique combo of guns and space magic that you don't really get anywhere else, wrapped up in a world that has countless possibilities to explore. It probably could have been even bigger if Bungie (read: Jason Jones) weren't so retarded and didn't keep doing stupid shit that hamstrung its development, but c'est la vie.

And I don't buy that they couldn't properly monetize it. When they say that, they really mean that they couldn't figure out how to pay for all the other dumb shit they were focusing on, like that dril tweet where he spends $1600 a month on candles and needs help budgeting. In this case, the candles are Bungie's studio renovation and the many failed incubation projects. They kept taking all the profits from Destiny and spending them before even thinking about whether it was a good idea, never once considering that the gravy train might run out. (Ironic that the third level of Marathon 1 is called Never Burn Money.)

I don't know if they actually wanted Destiny players to buy Marathon en masse or not, but if that was the plan, they didn't do a good job of it. Like you said, there really isn't a lot of overlap in terms of preferred play style. I think they legitimately thought that the Bungie Secret Sauce™ would do all the work and make Marathon an instant mega hit, hence why they spent absurd amounts of money on its development. Unfortunately, between the delays, the scandals, and the fact that it's part of a niche genre to begin with, it completely failed to meet the excessive expectations they put on it.

100% agreed that any attempt to make it more Destiny-like will not work either. All that will do is piss off the fans of the extraction shooter while failing to attract new players, especially the Destiny fans who refuse to touch the game on principle. I legitimately do not see a pathway out of darkness for the game. If they were smart, both games could have co-existed, but we're looking at a very real possibility of both dying completely and taking Bungie with them.

 

[Zenos Yae Viator]

The biggest mistake Bungie made was spending a decade cultivating an audience of PvE players who treat competition like a vampire treats sunlight, then expecting them to embrace a high-stakes PvP game.

well Bungie can't really do that either because they can't balance their games to save their fucking life.
0.5% top Destiny 2 PVP player (before I quite at Lightfall lol) here, the game was fundementally unbalanced in pvp, at all times, for the entirety of the games runtime.

I could go on and on, Bastion pre nerf doing enough to kill anyone in any super, shatterdive being allowed to stomp the game for way too fuckin long, ect ect.
Marathon isn't any better, its worse actually, "high end pvp" having zero balance put into it is a fucking nightmare, and that's what Bungie delivers, also tons of cheaters at all times even allowed full access to ranked and Trials of Osiris so bad that streamers had to constantly deal with them every time they played, same as everyone else.

 

[creaturestorm]

But to imply that Destiny was not a big franchise is pretty silly, I would say. It's had its ups and downs, but it's had millions of players over the years, and many of them turned out once more for the last update. It had a unique combo of guns and space magic that you don't really get anywhere else, wrapped up in a world that has countless possibilities to explore. It probably could have been even bigger if Bungie (read: Jason Jones) weren't so retarded and didn't keep doing stupid shit that hamstrung its development, but c'est la vie.

I wont argue that it didnt have millions of players over its decade long life span, especially as a f2p game, but chances are if I walked up to a random nerd off the street and asked them name a character from Destiny they cant answer. If I ask them the same for Halo I expect "master chief", "sgt Johnson", "Cortana", "Arbiter", or even "343 guilty spark".

Destiny didnt redefine an entire platform or gaming generation, meanwhile Halo's controls became the default for every single console FPS. Halo became the base line in so many ways or at the very least influenced every console FPS to follow, because 1 in 3 xbox players owned a copy of Halo 2.

Keep in mind H2's budget was 20 million, a one and done block buster event. D2's total cost through out its life time is supposedly over 1 billion, that's the biggest fucking huge ass hurdle of success possible.

also lets not forget that Halo is a multimedia universe, as bad as it is at times. This is what Destiny needed to keep marching forward, not just one big period of success, but by being a long term gold egg laying goose. It needed to become a house hold name, because the live service model and it's development costs demand it.

This game has had multiple rounds of lay offs,

well Bungie can't really do that either because they can't balance their games to save their fucking life.

actually a really good argument.

 

[Jarch6]

The post is referring to the daily active users # in particular, not the hourly graph for current players.
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This will 100% be used as cope though, which is still fun.

Indeed, it’s textbook motte-and-bailey. For this blast-having redditor, I present my “Reddit Gold”:

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Maybe they'll hit 2027 later today when people aren't at work.... oh, wait! You're not talking about the player numbers!

 

[King Dead]

I wont argue that it didnt have millions of players over its decade long life span, especially as a f2p game, but chances are if I walked up to a random nerd off the street and asked them name a character from Destiny they cant answer. If I ask them the same for Halo I expect "master chief", "sgt Johnson", "Cortana", "Arbiter", or even "343 guilty spark".

To be fair, a lot of that is thanks to Microsoft throwing a shitload of money at marketing it. Halo took a little bit of time to become the Xbox killer app, but when it did, Microsoft made sure everyone knew it, to the extent that Master Chief effectively became the Xbox mascot. This does make it ironic that Microsoft would then completely fuck up handling their biggest IP after buying it from Bungie, of course. But there really aren't games of that magnitude of launch anymore, certainly not to that extreme level of hype. Nobody really does midnight releases because most people buy digital nowadays. For better or worse, it kinda feels like GTA6 will be the last hurrah of blockbuster releases (assuming it doesn't crash and burn from its own ridiculous expectations).

(In your hypothetical, it also doesn't hurt that Halo has a pretty small cast of characters that the plot of the trilogy revolves around. You practically named all of them.)

I'm not denying Halo was a bigger name than Destiny, and it's not like I don't like Halo (still play around from time to time). I'm just saying that Destiny probably has a greater reach than you might think, even if it never quite reached the same levels of hype. If they hadn't kept fucking up its development and actually invested in it properly, it could have ended up in a much better place. Unfortunately, that didn't happen, just like Marathon, and now we're all left picking up the pieces.

(Oh, one other note with regards to Halo: the social aspect definitely helped with awareness of the IP as a whole. Going over to a friend's house and playing split-screen campaign or multiplayer, dicking around in Forge, or playing matchmaking or custom games online and shooting the shit over your headset...good times. Good times that got people who didn't even own an Xbox familiar with the game, especially.)

 

[Kane Lives]

But to imply that Destiny was not a big franchise is pretty silly, I would say. It's had its ups and downs, but it's had millions of players over the years, and many of them turned out once more for the last update. It had a unique combo of guns and space magic that you don't really get anywhere else, wrapped up in a world that has countless possibilities to explore. It probably could have been even bigger if Bungie (read: Jason Jones) weren't so retarded and didn't keep doing stupid shit that hamstrung its development, but c'est la vie.

It's a personal anecdote, but a friend and I were interested to dive into the game not long after it went F2P. After hearing about the absolutely horrible new player experience and the fact that it sunsetted content? We just moved on to Vermintide instead.

It's only an anecdote mind you, but I can't be the only one who were potentially the game's audience, took a look at the fucktarded decisions Bungo made, and walked away. Imagine how many players (existing and potential) they lost from that decision alone.