New ‘Marathon’ Report Raises Questions About Bungie’s Big Gamble

We still know very little about Marathon, with all information from Bungie limited to a trailer, a brief Vidoc and an announcement that game director Chris Barrett had been replaced with former Valorant director Joe Ziegler.

Behind the scenes rumors have been all over the place, and the latest I will lend some credence to, given that it comes from the ever-reliable Jason Schreier from Bloomberg. On the Friends Per Second podcast, Schreier says that sentiment around Marathon is “not great, from what I’ve heard…There’s a reason it was planned for this year and slipped a whole year.”

“People that I’ve talked to are a little pessimistic about it even hitting its current planned deadline, but we’ll see. I don’t know exactly when that is, sometime in 2025, I’m not sure.”

There was a dust-up some time ago where a reported playtest allegedly did not go well, and that was reported on by Destiny content creators like Aztecross who later deleted a video covering the topic as the sourcing and context did not seem good enough to broadcast. I know there have been more playtests since, but I have not heard anything leak from those.

While I’ve been talking to current and former Bungie employees about the layoff situation and everything surrounding it, I have heard surprisingly little about Marathon itself. Instead, multiple people commented on Gummi Bears, the new MOBA/fighting game that just went into SIE through a new studio and a few dozen Bungie devs. It’s supposed to be very fun.

The complete silence around Marathon for over a year has been a bit strange. The six minute Vidoc aired in May of 2023, and heavily featured then-director Chris Barrett who then left the project for unclear reasons a month or so later. We did not learn that Ziegler had replaced him until reporting came out about nine months later, and it was then officially announced. Ziegler tweeted on March 19, 2024 that he was the new game director and he was “excited to share more info on the game” as they get closer to release. There has been no more information shared since then, and Ziegler has not tweeted since that day.

Behind-the-scenes reporting before this from IGN’s Rebekah Valentine, indicates that Marathon has switched from custom player characters to a hero-like roster under Valorant’s Ziegler. This has been a huge turn-off to current Destiny players without further information to expand on how exactly that works. But a narrative this entire time has been that this game is probably not for Destiny players in the first place. Bungie neither wants to cannibalize their bread and butter game, and their main goal is to attract younger players and carve out a spot in the hard-to-break into multiplayer space.

I too would be surprised if Marathon made it out in full in 2025. While I would certainly expect some alphas or betas in that time, I just don’t know about that timetable given the enormous turmoil at Bungie and how little we’ve seen from it. But once again, Bungie leadership is telling its remaining workers that Marathon is do-or-die for the company. The same thing they said about The Final Shape before this, and despite how well-received that was, hundreds of layoffs followed.

I do not think there is enough concrete information about Marathon to make solid judgements about its state, but part of that is certainly on Bungie not showing off anything official about the game for 15 months now.

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