Sony has essentially acknowledged that Bungie isn’t the golden-goose guarantee it once looked like, and it sounds like Marathon is carrying more pressure than ever. The company says it has made changes to Marathon and is now “very confident” about the March 5 launch.
Bungie’s new chapter under the PlayStation umbrella has been questioned for months, with sky-high expectations creating intense pressure to deliver a modern multiplayer experience and, above all, to prove the studio can debut a fresh franchise without leaning entirely on Destiny. That next major proving ground is Marathon, a sci-fi multiplayer extraction shooter slated to release on March 5.
Marathon, Bungie’s Big Test
A lot has already been said about this FPS, but in recent days Sony has sounded notably confident about Marathon after post-delay changes and a controversy involving alleged art plagiarism, an issue the company says has now been fully resolved.
On its latest earnings call, Sony CFO Lin Tao addressed Marathon directly roughly a month before launch and explained that closed testing helped the shooter.
Tao said the playtests highlighted “good points and not-so-good points”, and that the weaker areas prompted changes that have already been implemented. After those adjustments, the CFO stated: “We are very confident in launching it on March 5.” It’s worth recalling that the game was originally targeting 2024, then moved to 2025, and later – in June of that year – delayed indefinitely, fueling doubts about development, especially with Concord looming over the conversation.
Despite earlier confidence, Sony has had to recalibrate its expectations for Bungie after an integration that proved more complicated than anticipated. In its latest financial report, Lin Tao acknowledged that “initial expectations with Bungie were overly optimistic and have been revised accordingly”, leading to losses that impacted first-quarter fiscal results. This comes as Destiny 2 has reportedly missed sales expectations, making Marathon’s March 5 date a crucial test for the studio. A few months ago, Sony admitted the Bungie acquisition hadn’t delivered the results it expected, but the studio still helps shape PlayStation’s games-as-a-service strategy and, just days ago, announced another title: Horizon Hunters Gathering.
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