Bungie's Marathon reboot is apparently still coming out this year as PlayStation boasts that its extraction shooter has "strong early engagement," which is weird considering all the controversy of recent weeks.
In a new business segment presentation focused on gaming, Sony doubled down on its live-service focus with at least four in-house studios all-in on evergreen online games. And in one slide, Sony makes a comparison between Helldivers 2, which has 3.6 million players a month, and Marathon, which has apparently courted "strong early engagement for Bungie's bold and innovative new title."
Positioning Marathon as this year's Helldivers 2 would make sense - they're both big, premium, sci-fi shooters from the same publisher – except for the fact that Bungie's facing an uphill battle this time around.
Just last month, it was found that Marathon's already divisive playtests (thanks, PC Gamer) featured several designs and art work from indie artist 'Antireal.' To avoid any legal trouble, the studio almost immediately began reviewing all of the assets in the game.
"It came to our attention that an artist who worked on Marathon in the early stages of pre-production took a number of graphic elements from a graphic designer, without permission or acknowledgement, and placed them on a decal sheet that was then checked in in 2020," art director Joe Cross then said in a slightly awkward dev stream.
"The decal sheet included icons and text elements. These elements ended up in our alpha build. There is absolutely no excuse for this oversight and we are working on and 100% committed to our review process to ensure instances like this don't happen again on Marathon or at Bungie." Bungie apparently reached out to Antireal, though we don't yet know how that turned out.
The iconic FPS developer has since been pretty much radio silent online. (The game's official social media account hasn't tweeted anything since that livestream.) A report about the company's low morale also raised questions around whether Marathon would even come out this September, though another Sony slide does insist it's still set to release this fiscal year.
Marathon is slated to come to PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S on September 23.
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