The sentiment around Marathon at Bungie is ‘not great’, it’s claimed

The mood at Bungie regarding its upcoming game Marathon is “not great,” it’s claimed.

Appearing on the latest episode of Skill Up’s Friends Per Second podcast, Bloomberg journalist Jason Schreier was asked what the “temperature check” was at Bungie relating to Marathon.

“Not great, from what I’ve heard,” Schreier replied.

“There’s a reason that it was planned for this year and slipped a whole year, and 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.

He added: “Yeah, the sentiment, I’ve heard, is not great around it, at least of a few months ago.”

Schreier also pointed out that the game received a leadership shake-up earlier this year, when game director Christopher Barrett and executive producer Carrie Gouskos left the project.

Giving his opinion on the likely reception to the game when it’s released, Schreier said he didn’t feel the Bungie fanbase would be enthusiastic about a PvP extraction shooter, and that he was concerned its continued development may lead to a similar issue to that of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League.

“Suicide Squad started development in 2017 when live servce was the hot new thing, and because of sunk cost fallacy and endless delays, and because there wasn’t really an interest or willingness in cancelling it because they had committed so much money to it, and there was just a belief that ‘we want to get this out, it’s going to be cool’, it came out and just totally flopped,” he explained.

“I’m worried about Marathon being in a similar situation where it’s been in development for a while. It enterted development when extraction shooters were super hot, I don’t know if that’s the case anymore.

“And now because they’ve committed so much money. and because it was the project that was the furthest along, as opposed to all their other incubation bets, they’re really putting a lot into it, and I’m just not sure there’s much of a chance that it’ll be successful.

“But then again, you know know. If you had asked me in January, I would have been like ‘yeah, Helldivers 2, that game is going to tank so freaking hard, it just looks like a disaster’, and of course it turned out to be the biggest thing ever, so that’s why I like to report, and not so much to make prognostications.”