Bungie has now issued a studio update after Destiny 2 shut down this summer and triggered a massive wave of layoffs, and it requires help from Marathon. The sci-fi shooter saw a middling reception despite heart-eyed reviews when it launched in March, but Bungie thinks the game deserves another chance – both for Bungie's sake, and for the reputation of its live-service games.
Acknowledging that Marathon "did not reach as many players as we had hoped," Bungie insists it will push the extraction shooter through an "evolution" in a new blog post and matching YouTube video you can watch below. Mainly, the developer wants to break down some of Marathon's genre walls and give it wider appeal as a survival experience.
"We aren't just listening to feedback, we understand your disappointment," Bungie studio head Poria Torkan and Marathon GM Josh Deane write in their joint blog while addressing layoffs at Bungie. Part of what's brought the studio to such tragic lows this year, the Bungie leads say, is the fact that "we lost sight of what we should be prioritizing most, our players."
Marathon's current Mixed Steam rating summarizes some players' sense of alienation. GamesRadar+ features editor Andrew Brown writes in his four-and-a-half-star Marathon review that the FPS "has consumed me entirely. The depth of Marathon's maps, set against the simplicity of its violence, make for intoxicating bursts of dopamine" – and even Marathon's biggest haters share these opinions.
Marathon's most helpfully-rated English review on Steam, for example, agrees that Marathon is a stunner, "but it is an extraction shooter. [...] Extraction shooters are being released at a rate not seen before and some people are beginning to realize something. People ruin games."
Earlier this year, Marathon's former game director Joe Ziegler – he stepped down not long after Bungie's last bout of layoffs – told GamesRadar+ that the most valuable part of PvP is that it "pushes you to adapt to the whim and unexpected thoughts of other players." But if most players don't like the process of shoving each other into lockers, then you see the kind of decline Marathon is currently facing; according to SteamDB, the game's all-time Steam player peak of 88,337 has crumbled to about 2,000 concurrent players a day.
"So, we're going to anchor on what makes Marathon special but evolve it beyond the genre constraints we placed on it," Torkan and Deane say. "We're going to expand Marathon to a deeper survival experience, that gives players more ways to take on this dangerous alien world."
Marathon devs plan on "strengthening its combat, world, and competitive tension while giving players more agency in how they engage with the game" through the end of 2026, the studio leads say. "That means creating meaningful experiences whether you prefer cooperative PvE, competitive PvP, or the unpredictable tension of Marathon PvPvE.
"It's important to us that no matter your playstyle, or your skill level.... we find better ways to hear from you as we get back to where we need to be: making games you want to play."
The developers promise more details "on our future vision for Marathon" later this week, and they remind players the game "was never intended to replace Destiny."
To that point, Bungie is unvaulting the Destiny 2 content it dropped in the trash over the past few years as part of a separate, but related, attempt to restore its live-service games' luster. Marathon's revamp is more of an extra layer of protection, then, bubble-wrapping Bungie at the end of what looks to be another tough year for video games.
Bungie shuts down leak claiming Destiny will be revived through a merger with Marathon.
