Via Bungie
At this point, Marathon isn’t just a bad game. It’s a slow-motion implosion, and the debris is already hitting Bungie, Sony, and everyone else in the blast radius. After the spectacularly bad launch of Concord, it’s hard not to ask: what exactly is happening behind the scenes at Sony? Because from where I’m standing, this is starting to look like a creative house fire they’re trying to put out with hope and hubris.
Let’s start with the obvious. The game was doomed from concept. An extraction shooter built to please both hardcore Tarkov veterans and casual FPS players? That’s not a needle you thread. That’s a needle you trip over and land face-first in a vat of genre confusion.
Hardcore players hate how soft the game feels. Casual players get chewed up and spit out by mechanics like full loot loss, seasonal gear resets, and a gameplay loop that encourages you to “have no fun and like it.” The result? Nobody’s happy. Marathon manages to be too punishing for newcomers and too forgiving for veterans. Which is an achievement, if you think about it.
Then there’s the gameplay. Oh boy.
You’d think Bungie, the studio that practically patented “best-feeling gunplay ever,” would ace this. But Marathon feels like a slower, clunkier Apex Legends if the fun had been surgically removed and replaced with vibes. Yes, there are bots. Yes, you can be invisible. Yes, you can wallhack. And no, those aren’t features. Those are war crimes in the extraction shooter genre.
The “hero shooter” overlay just makes everything worse. Instead of building your own character and loadout like in other extraction games, you're stuck with prebuilt archetypes with overpowered abilities that don’t belong anywhere near a permadeath system. It’s like giving Among Us crewmates superpowers and wondering why no one’s having fun.
And just to twist the knife, this all dropped right when ARC Raiders was running a clean, polished alpha that made Marathon look like a prototype from 2019. The contrast was brutal. Player numbers cratered. Twitch interest vanished. Streamers who hyped it on day one quietly noped out by day three. We’re talking a drop from 150,000 viewers to single-digit thousands. That’s not a dip. That’s a disappearance.
But the disaster doesn’t stop with bad design. Oh no. It gets worse.
Enter the plagiarism scandal. Turns out someone on the team, allegedly a “former” artist, lifted entire art pieces from a creator named ANTIREAL and slipped them into the game’s textures. We’re not talking “inspired by” here. We’re talking 1:1 rip-offs. Bungie had to pull assets, audit the entire game, and issue a public apology during a livestream meant to hype the game.
This wasn’t just an oopsie. It was the final nail in Marathon’s already half-built coffin. The one thing the game had going for it - its unique visual style (as ugly as it is) - is now permanently tainted. Even if they rebuild the art from scratch, Marathon will always carry the stink of being “that game that stole its soul.” And when your community is laughing at you mid-livestream, you’re not pivoting to a win. You’re limping toward a mercy kill.
Now imagine trying to charge $40 for this. Not free-to-play. Not a Game Pass gift. Forty actual human dollars for a team-based extraction shooter that ignores solo players, has minimal launch content, and is built on a gameplay model nobody asked for. In this economy? Good luck.
And let’s not pretend this is just a bad quarter. This is going to hurt Bungie. This is going to hurt Destiny. This is going to have ripple effects at Sony, which bet $3.6 billion on a studio that can’t seem to ship a win. Layoffs are coming. Leadership changes are coming. And you better believe someone in a suit is wondering if they should’ve bought FromSoftware instead.
What’s wild is that we’ve seen this play out before. Big-budget, live-service, overdesigned shooters with no real hook or audience - Anthem, Battleborn, Redfall, Concord. We’ve had the warning signs. We’ve seen the craters. And yet here we are, making the same mistake, one more time, This time with plagiarism.
I don’t know what the end looks like for Marathon. But I know we’ve passed the point of saving it. The game may limp to release. It may get patched, rebranded, reshaped. But the damage is done. The audience has moved on. The devs are demoralized. And the community? They’re already making memes about what to put on the tombstone.
Me? I’m just sitting here watching the fire burn, wondering how a studio that built legends ended up here.
