Sony has announced that Bungie’s upcoming extraction shooter Marathon, which was initially slated for release this year before a negatively received beta saw it delayed, will still release by March 2026.
Brilliantly, Sony announced this in the same financial report that saw it basically throw its hands up and tell investors, yeah, that Bungie acquisition didn’t really work out. There are many more reasons for that than Marathon, of course: Destiny 2 is in a big slump, while the studio has gone through multiple rounds of layoffs, and its CEO recently departed.
But the mood music around Marathon is not great and with Concord in the rear-view mirror, one of the biggest live service flops in the industry’s history, you sense a certain caution in the Sony executive suite.
Marathon was announced with a (fantastic) trailer in 2023, but was indefinitely delayed earlier this year after “passionate” feedback. There was also, for good measure, a plagiarism scandal.
Sony Chief Financial Officer Lin Tao now says the company is “fully dedicated to launching the title to schedule” which means by March 2026: “We will assume that we will launch this within this [financial] year, and that is included in the forecast.”
(Image credit: Bungie)
The currently running playtests are focused on the game’s quality and ability to retain players. “We are in the process of analysing the performance against those [Key Performance Indicators],” said Tao, “and as needed, we will make corrections.”
Whether those corrections can alter Marathon’s trajectory… well, that remains to be seen. Bungie recently announced another closed playtest for the game, and it’s certainly not a bad shooter, but you worry about how this thing’s going to land. It certainly doesn’t help that Arc Raiders has just become everyone’s favourite extraction shooter and, when Embark was looking at the reception to Marathon, realised it had yinned where Bungie yanged.
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