Concord's catastrophic failure has made me even more worried about Bungie's Marathon

GamesFPSConcord’s catastrophic failure has made me even more worried about Bungie’s MarathonWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

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(Image credit: Bungie)

Teaser image from Bungie�s extraction shooter reboot of Marathon.

What’s also remarkable is that Concord presumably had the deep pockets of Sony to draw on, after the publisher acquired Firewalk Studios last April. Although Firewalk is a new developer, it’s packed with industry veterans, notably including several who worked in senior gameplay roles at Bungie on Destiny 2. That DNA connection is partly why I’ve been thinking about Marathon this week, and how shaky its own prospects seem, but there are other similarities too.

So I expected Concord to struggle, and Sony must have had the same inkling given the lack of marketing support.

Tyler Wilde wrote about why Concord hadlanded with such a thudlast week, and I’m not here to relitigate those reasons, but I agree that it’s a conflation of many causes: The aesthetic was too safe to stand out. The combat lacked a hook that made you rush to tell your friends about it. The retail pricing in a world of free-to-play games felt like a wild misreading of the room.

So I expected Concord to struggle, and Sony must have had the same inkling given how little marketing support I saw around the launch. It’s a brutal reminder that, in this market, being an okay game is nowhere near enough to break through.

Is the live service model the problem?

What I don’t think is true is the idea that Concord is the canary in the mine for live service games as a model. Take another look at theSteam numbersand you’ll see the likes of Apex Legends, Rainbow Six Siege and now Deadlock ticking along nicely. What wecansay is that it’s getting harder and harder to persuade players to abandon their current ‘forever’ game in favor of spending time with something else. To a degree all games face the same battle for attention, but there are few genres as brutally competitive as online PvP shooters.

Marathon | Official Announce Trailer - YouTubeWatch On

Marathon | Official Announce Trailer - YouTube

All of which adds to the challenge facing Marathon, and is why if I were an accountant at Sony, I would be sweating Gjallarhorn rockets right now. Obviously, I’m not going to pre-judge the quality of a game that we’ve only seen a CG trailer of [above], but I’ve always had a nagging worry about Marathon’s fate, not least who it’s actually supposed to be for. Here’s what we know for certain about Marathon:

As you would expect in the wake of major layoffs, there’s been plenty of reporting around morale at Bungie, and none of it has been good. There have been murmurings that Marathon as a project is not in a great place. On August 9, Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier told theFriends Per Second podcast: “[Marathon] sentiment is not great, there’s a reason it slipped a whole year and some developers don’t even think it’ll even hit its current deadline.”

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It would be little wonder if Sony took a very hands-on approach with the studio it bought for $3.6B

A source I spoke with confirmed that the game has seen substantial scope changes since announcement, and was sceptical about its chances. They added that Marathon had seen multiple senior departures, even before Barrett’s removal, and that in the wake of what’s happened with Concord, some are worried about what it will mean for Marathon.

The pandemic effect

Let’s put all the chaos surrounding Bungie and Destiny 2 to the side and imagine Marathon arrives next year and is a solid take on the extraction shooter. Would that be enough to pull in the kind of numbers Bungie needs? Escape from Tarkov, the dominant force in the genre, exploded in May 2020 after a major update (a “wipe” in Tarkov terms),passing 200kconcurrents according to Battlestate Games COO Nikita Buyanov.

It should be noted though, that mid-2020 was pretty much theheight of the COVID-19 pandemic, and that was a time when multiplayer games saw a huge boost of activity from people being stuck at home in front of their PCs. It was also a period in which many studios placed big bets on expanding and greenlighting new projects, and those that failed have led to thelayoffs across game developmentin the last couple of years.

At reveal, the Marathon reboot was praised for its clean, stylish visuals.(Image credit: Bungie)

Teaser image from Bungie’s extraction shooter reboot of Marathon.

Although we can’t know for sure when work on Marathon began, the fact it’s an extraction shooter at all suggests Bungie saw the success of Tarkov and banked on the genre continuing its meteoric growth. But jump back to the present day, and although extraction shooters are an established subgenre propping up a few successful games, it’s not battle royale big. Even more problematically for Bungie, large parts of the Destiny 2 fanbase—which ought to be Bungie’s easiest demographic to target—are actively, vocally, hostile toward Marathon to the point ofopenly wanting to see it fail.

If I were Sony… we might be having a very difficult conversation about what’s to be done with Marathon.

But if there’s one studio that does seem to do its best work from a stress position, it’s Bungie. I love the feel of its gunplay to the tune of many thousands of hours logged in Destiny 2, and frankly I go into every new game hoping it succeeds. But if I were Sony and I was picking up the tab for what has just happened with Concord, particularly with Destiny 2 bleeding players in the aftermath of The Final Shape… Well, then we might be having a very difficult conversation about what’s to be done with Marathon.

PRODUCTSMarathonDestiny 2Concord

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Is the live service model the problem?#

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The pandemic effect#

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The pandemic effect