A Wider Base Supports A Taller Tower

Good morning, it is Friday.

We’ve all had 24-odd hours to digest the recent info dump from Bungie regarding Marathon’s upcoming December update, along with additional details and Easter eggs hinting at what to expect from its follow-up in March 2027. Players have spent the last day analyzing the Dev Diary frame by frame, uncovering everything from potential future weapons and cosmetics to enemy types and Map 5 details.

It’s been nice. Refreshingly so.

After spending the last six or so months trying to highlight where Marathon succeeds while also trying to be reasonable about its pitfalls, it’s a nice change of tune to see excitement and intrigue from a wider subset of players. This is also, in part, due to the renewed promise of Destiny’s future at Bungie, as many players who outright rejected Marathon, believing it to be responsible for the abandonment of Destiny, have now vocalized an interest in jumping in this December, or even sooner in some cases.

We’ve covered these developments already, two weeks ago when the Season 3 delay was announced, and just yesterday following the publication of Bungie’s “The Future of Marathon” blog post and accompanying Dev Diary, so we don’t need to get back into the details of that.

This is ultimately a temperature check about a few points I’ve seen raised.

Once upon a time, industry titan Bungie announced that they’d be releasing an extraction shooter based on their then-dormant IP, Marathon. Coming from the ashes of Destiny’s own PvP arm, this made for an intriguing proposition: a Bungie title focused solely on delivering a curated PvP experience, and one with quite a daring art style. In an industry hellbent on pushing towards hyperrealism and specifically mil-sim in shooters, Marathon was a breath of fresh air. Even those who abhorred the “graphic realism” art style had to admit that, at the very least, it was different. The music and scoring were unique, the weapons and characters were zany; things you rarely ever see in a AAA title anymore. Games with budgets this big are trying their damndest to be as risk-averse as possible, which has led to homogenization (and ushered in a renewed mass appreciation for indie titles that look unique, which, silver lining).

All of this is to say, many Marathon players really enjoyed the fact that there was a AAA title that was pushing that hard to stand out, calling it the “best shooter since TitanFall 2,” and relishing in the fact that Bungie seemingly had no intention of compromising on its vision.

And then, unfortunately, the numbers became too hard to ignore. Too difficult for anyone to reasonably justify, and I imagine absolutely impossible for SIE to accept. The Dev Diary starts with somewhat somber reflections from Julia Nardin (Creative Director), Del Chafe III (Game Director), and Kevin Yanes (Combat Director). The three of them individually vocalized how proud they were of what they’d created and shipped, but ultimately that their vision did not resonate with as many people as they’d anticipated, with the most telling sentiments from Yanes:

* “While death *is* the first step, for many players, death was the *only* step.”

* “We all thought we were going to bring extractions to the masses, we didn’t, we built an extraction shooter… as you’ve ever seen one.”

To many people, this sounds like an admission of defeat, that Bungie had to compromise its vision to appeal to a wider audience. However, as with most things, there are two sides of this coin.

On the one hand, absolutely. The extraction core of the game is fun, flawed, but fun and unique nonetheless. The release of Season 1 being many people’s (including my own) first exposure to the genre led to an irreplicable feeling amongst the game’s early adopters: we all agree we may never experience anything like those first few weeks of launch again. The novelty of it all. Many people were hoping that constantly renewing that feeling would be the primary focus of Bungie’s endeavor, and that a dip into PvE would pull away from those efforts. It’s worth noting, many of Bungie’s oldest fans have seen how multiple modes play out over time; eventually one mode gets all the love, and the rest fall to the wayside. Once burned, twice shy.

On the other hand, the music has to be faced. Marathon is a game whose development commands an incalculably high budget, and for it to survive, it must also command a playerbase that can support it. A hyper-niche live service cannot accomplish that, especially not after the title spent a year being a public punching bag and the subject of constant controversy. The game had to grow horizontally to create a stable enough base to bring in more players for vertical growth. Had Marathon been a single release with an overblown budget, it would’ve potentially become a cult classic, but as a live service that has metrics to hit to maintain development, it cannot stand on five to ten thousand players across all platforms per day while carrying the weight of a fifty-million-dollar annual operating cost. It needs more players, it needs those players to buy more cosmetics, it needs those players to log more hours, more players to be more excited, more players to tell more players to jump in more regularly.

Something Del Chafe III reaffirmed in the update is that the team has no intention of turning its back on its early adopters, those who stuck through its first year and played through the brutality of the extraction mode for hundreds if not thousands of hours: “we don’t want to forget the players who have been on the journey.” As Raylene Deck (Senior Design Lead) said: “players that are really into the game are really into the game.”

Ultimately, while players are skeptical of where the game is headed, as is their right, all we can really do is hold onto what’s being said. There is no use in subscribing to constant doomerism as all it can do is soil your experience. Marathon and its team seemingly have no desire to pump the brakes on catering to the core audience, but that core audience is going to need some help from a wider, more casual base if they want to enjoy it far into the future, and secure more moments like those first weeks of launch.