Marathon’s Pay-to-Play Gambit is a Risk

You’ll have to pay for Bungie’s upcoming Marathon. And if you want to see everything, you’ll need to pay again and again.

It’s been less than a year since Concord was released then unreleased within a two week period. It was a wake up call for PlayStation bosses, who rapidly backed away from their Games as a Service push, cancelling a slew of unreleased titles including a game based around God of War.

But the folks behind Halo and Destiny are confident enough in their next title that they’re willing to risk it. Marathon will be a paid title. You won’t be paying $80 for this one – what is this, a Nintendo game? – but it will have battle passes. You’ll be buying your way into an ecosystem where you must buy your way into battle passes in order to have access to everything.

And while this isn’t necessarily a new thing in the grand scheme of things, in this day and age? And with Sony’s recent history? It’s a recipe for disaster.

Because regardless of how good Marathon is – and opinion is split on that right now – it’s up against some of the most successful, popular games of all time. It must compete for attention with the likes of Call of Duty, Fortnite, Rocket League and more. And all of those are free. They’re free, and their players are already fully into the ecosystem. They’re unlikely to break out.

Of course, Bungie isn’t a free-to-play developer. Destiny was a paid title. Destiny 2 was a paid title for the first two years of its life too, until 2019. And no doubt Bungie have plans in place to make that transition with Marathon if they need to. This won’t be a Concord situation. The stakes are just too high.

Bungie: A Marathon, Not a Sprint

This is a big game for Bungie. Since Sony bought them, it’s been a difficult time. Destiny 2’s expansions have not been the success they’d hoped, and their role in Sony’s GaaS push seems to have petered out. That’s expected alongside the initiative itself.

There’s been a lot of behind the scenes drama. When Sony purchased Bungie they were mildly independent. Those days quickly ended.

Marathon needs to be successful. I’m sure it doesn’t have to be “Replace Fortnite in a weekend” successful. Just enough to prove itself and justify its existence. Can it do that by asking players used to free games to pay for something unproven?

I’m not optimistic, but it’s always interesting to see where people end up. I didn’t think Helldivers 2 would be the success it was, and that was a paid title too. Marathon is on Xbox, as well as PlayStation and PC, giving a whole other platform of potential players. And that’s presuming it doesn’t end up on Switch 2 in the near future too, which it almost certainly will.

Any multiplayer game with a price tag is going to have an uphill struggle. Hell, any game with a price tag has an uphill struggle. That’s the modern gaming industry. It’s a mess. Betting on a winner is always going to be a struggle. This one has a huge amount of talent behind it. Is that going to be enough?