‘Marathon’ Isn’t Canceled, But It’s Bad We Even Have To Ask That

Marathon cannot stop being thrown into fresh drama every few days since its controversial Closed Alpha which led to a string of reports about things going poorly internally, capped off by a revelation that an artist had plagiarized art currently still in the game.

Now, we have a worrying report from Colin Moriarty on Sacred Symbols where he says that all paid marketing for Marathon this quarter has been canceled by Sony.

“I was told by someone familiar with marketing plans in a key overseas market that there are now no plans to do paid marketing for Marathon at all, I don’t know if those plans were affected by what has recently happened or if that was always the plan or whatever but it is considered a fairly unusual move for a game of this high profile.”

This tracks somewhat with what I was told a little while back, though he’s getting info on the Sony side (he’s trustworthy) while I’m getting it on the Bungie side. I heard the entire marketing plan was thrown out and had to restart from scratch, and plans like a new trailer launching pre-orders and a big public beta a month before launch were not happening. I didn’t hear anything about all paid marketing being erased, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s where things ended up.

There is now talk about whether this means Marathon is delayed or even cancelled after its disastrous couple of weeks. Delayed? I’m almost positive, yes. Canceled? It’s hard to see how that could happen given that it would be Sony’s second obscene live service blowup in a year. Blowing up a game on the launchpad this close to release with years and hundreds of millions invested would be insanity. It’s close to what happened with Concord, yes, but the difference here is that this is Bungie, not just a storied shooter studio but one that Sony paid (an absurdly overpriced) $3.6 billion for.

You can’t cancel it now. It’s too late. You have to roll the dice, but to do that, you need at least some sort of delay to reset the narrative and polish and add…I don’t know, something to the game to make it more of a draw at launch. A delay is what I think this marketing hold means because you’re not going to bother spooling up a big ad campaign for a game that isn’t coming out until when? Sometime in 2026, from the looks of all this.

I have been on the “delay Marathon” train before, and I still think it’s the least-worst option, but my position has also evolved into thinking it simply does not matter. Marathon’s problems are too foundational, a class-based extraction game entirely unbalanced for solo play, not accessible enough for casuals, and not hardcore enough for existing genre players. Oh, and its cool art style that was the one thing it had going for it? You can’t talk about that without saying “plagiarism” in the same sentence, no matter how few decals may have been stolen.

The marketing spend pull isn’t a shock, but I get how it certainly sounds like that. The writing has pretty clearly been on the wall since the Alpha that this is not a game that can be released in four months, and it’s not just because of some visual polish.

Still, I have not heard anything internally about a delay (or cancellation, though those conversations are probably only happening at the top levels. But if Sony is making this move now, some public news may be imminent.

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