Marathon
Concord is now cemented as not just an unfortunate release, but quite literally one of the biggest failures in gaming history. Two weeks after launch, the game will be shut down, and all copies are already being refunded. This is after years of development time and tens of millions of dollars, chasing a live service shooter trend without making any sort of mark to stand out when it arrived.
It is also part of Sony’s recent push into live service, where they previously had a massive success in Helldivers 2 earlier this year, but now this historic failure with Concord. As such, attention now turns to the two highest profile upcoming Sony live games that remain, Bungie’s Marathon and Haven’s Fairgame$.
Marathon is meant to be out in 2025, the product of a large non-Destiny portion of Bungie, a studio which has undergone 200+ layoffs in the last year alone, and has seen rapidly falling player numbers in the wake of Destiny 2’s saga-ending expansion, The Final Shape, even though that game presses on.
Marathon
For all intents and purposes, Marathon is a new IP. It’s not really of course, Bungie released the original Marathon in 1994, but the younger generation this shooter is trying to court probably wasn’t even born for another 10-15 years past that. So yes, it’s new, which is a barrier when a game like say, Marvel Rivals can waltz in with an established roster of heroes.
Marathon’s development has not been especially smooth. Its first and only trailer was released a year ago back in May 2023, alongside a vidoc explaining the game which has now been taken offline. Why, you ask? Well, because it heavily featured Marathon’s former game director, Chris Barrett, who, according to Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier, was reportedly fired not long after that was filmed after Bungie investigated complaints of his inappropriate behavior toward women.
Before that reason surfaced in recent weeks, additional reporting by IGN’s Rebekah Valentine revealed that Marathon had been taken over after Barrett’s firing by former Valorant director Joe Ziegler. There was additional reporting at that time that Marathon had switched from fully custom characters to heroes instead, an unusual choice for an extraction shooter and something that has set alarm bells off with current Bungie fans.
There has simply been no meaningful public information about the game since Ziegler was forced to confirm he was directing it. He promised more information soon but none came. Now, we’re a few months away from 2025 and we just watched the spontaneous combustion of Concord, a fellow PvP title from Sony. It’s time to start talking.
But Marathon is at least a Bungie shooter, which is worth something after generations of Halo and a decade of Destiny, which, if nothing else, was and is an excellent shooter. But Haven’s Fairgame$ feels like an even taller order with higher barriers to success. The high-profile Jade Raymond runs Haven, but she has been bounced around between projects for a while now and a PvPvE heist shooter is not exactly the sort of thing she became well-known for.
Fairgame$ too has shared perilously little information since it was announced, and unlike the Marathon trailer which has 21 million views and a very positive 91K/4K like to dislike ration on YouTube, the Fairgame$ trailer released at the exact same time has 265K views and a 4K/22K underwater ratio. These numbers are pretty close to the reception the more recent Concord trailer got, and in short, people liked the look of Marathon, but they did not like the look of Fairgame$. That CGI-only trailer free from actual gameplay is the only major thing we’ve seen from the game so far.
Fairgame$’s “look” certainly echoes both Payday and The Finals, the former of which has now more or less melted as a series, and the latter has arrived in the shooter market without much of an impact. The Finals’ daily peak on Steam is somewhere around 15K. Fine, but it’s not really a part of the conversation. There are recent internal reports that Sony is happy with how Fairgame$ is shaping up, but we heard similar things about Concord. But Concord’s problem was not even that it was bad, it was that people were not interested. I do not think people are interested in Fairgame$. Not right now, in any case.
Finaly, it’s…called Fairgame$. I already hate writing that by the end of this article. You may not think it’s significant, but it is, and it should change. While I have some faith that Marathon could be a hit, maybe even a big one, I do not get that vibe from Fairgame$ at all. And that’s the exact same vibe I got from Concord as soon as it was revealed.
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