Sony Interactive Entertainment and Bungie’s upcoming player versus player extraction shooter, Marathon, is facing development issues, based on the latest report.
During the latest episode of Friends Per Second on the Skill Up YouTube channel, guest Jason Schreier, who is known for his game industry insights, was asked how the development of Marathon is going. In response, Schreier said that things weren’t great based on what he had heard.
Schreier mentioned that there’s a reason Marathon was originally planned for release this year in 2024. He said that the game slipped a whole year to sometime in 2025, and people he’s talked to are a little pessimistic about it even hitting its current planned deadline. He mentioned that the sentiment that has been shared with him around it is not great. This is based on what he had been told a few months ago.
He also said that he isn’t sure if Marathon is the right bet, given that it’s an extraction shooter, with PVP as well as PVE attached to it. He doesn’t think that’s what a lot of Bungie fans are looking for, so it is kind of a strange bet from his subjective standpoint. Furthermore, Schreier highlighted that Marathon has had a big leadership shakeup, as it lost its director a few months ago, followed by its executive producer leaving the studio.
Schreier compared the situation faced by Marathon to that of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League. According to him, the reason for that is because the latter began development in 2017 when live service was the talk of the town, and because of sunk cost fallacy, endless delays, and because there wasn’t really an interest or willingness in cancelling the game after committing so much money to it, there was just a belief that everything would work out. However, Schreier highlighted that once the game did release, it just “totally flopped”.
He expressed concern about Marathon being in a similar situation where it entered development when extraction shooters were popular, and he doesn’t know if that’s the case anymore. But because Bungie has committed a lot of money into the project and because it was the furthest along in development as opposed to all of the studio’s other incubation bets, the development team is putting a lot into it.
