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The story
A Reddit post has revealed that Season 3 of “Marathon” — Sony and Bungie’s new extraction shooter — has been pushed back to December 8th, and that the seasonal content model itself is being scrapped going forward. On 5channel’s hardware/industry board (commonly called “Geha,” short for ゲーム業界/game industry), posters pointed to reports that concurrent player counts have hit new all-time lows on both peaks and troughs, drew comparisons to “Concord” — which shut down less than two weeks after launch despite a roughly ¥40 billion ($270M) development budget — and cited Bungie’s roughly ¥500 billion ($3.4B) acquisition price, sparking a wave of speculation about whether the game can survive and when it might get shut down.
So what are they gonna do about this?
Source: reddit.com / Original thread here
What people said
Maybe about one 'Concord' worth of lifespan left
Given Sony's cost-cutting mindset, it's done after this next one
Sounds like they're in a meeting figuring out who has to fall on their sword
Last chance
Even so, the fact it's still out there and running at all makes it a success story second only to Helldivers 2 (at least by SIE's own rankings)
They need to make their move before Helldivers 2 starts losing steam
But does this game even still find matches right now?
Dozens of people working for the sake of 2,000 players is almost impressive
Like some underground idol group
Server shutdown in another six months, probably
And PlayStation fans keep following a company like that, of course they do
Being a PlayStation fan really must be a point of pride for them
Something's definitely falling apart internally…
Meaning the 'surplus staff' pool is only growing
Part of the Destiny team has already been laid off, though…
Exactly right
Basically the Square Enix mobile-game playbook
Because the acquisition price was way too huge to just walk away
Trying to fix things up and keep it going is fine in principle, but the people playing Marathon are into it for the PvPvE mix — if it goes full PvE they'll bail, and PvE fans aren't going to jump into a service that's this visibly scrambling
Still, that beats just yanking the plug out of nowhere
Pure wounded pride at this point
Shutting it down fast would trigger a refund firestorm, so…
Leaving it on life support is actually the safer play
Is that other game only played by two people or something?
At this rate there's going to be nothing left
There's still the space-baldy game!
Though once that one ships, there really will be nothing left…
They probably want to Concord it, but doing that a second time would confirm 'three strikes' territory, so this is the least-bad option
The reputation of 'Sony's live-service games always get shut down fast' has already stuck
Which means people stop spending money on them too
So they've got no choice but to keep bleeding money on this and the Marvel fighting game both
Xbox torched itself with Redfall and Starfield
Halo and Gears aren't exactly popular anymore either
Background and key points
Marathon is a new title from Bungie, the studio Sony acquired in 2022 for roughly ¥500 billion ($3.4B), with a development budget reported at around ¥40 billion ($270M). Sony’s live-service track record includes “Concord,” which was also built on a roughly ¥40 billion budget and shut down less than two weeks after launch — the thread’s comparisons are drawn directly from that precedent. The Season 3 delay and the decision to abandon the seasonal model altogether both read as a course correction from the original live-service plan. That said, the claimed “all-time low” concurrent player counts and the specific figures cited for the Bungie acquisition and development budget come from posters in the thread and haven’t been independently verified against a primary source. The thread also brings up other Sony titles and past layoff reports, suggesting the unease here isn’t really about Marathon in isolation, but broader distrust of Sony’s live-service business as a whole.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5channel (Hardware/Industry board, “Geha”) thread “[Bad News] Marathon delays next week’s Season 3 to December, seasonal model also being scrapped.”
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