Fans are worried that the Marathon reboot is going to be another live service disaster for Sony and Bungie.
Taking a niche single-player series and twisting it into a live service extraction shooter is already risky and considering Sony’s struggles with the live service game space, it’s been hard to be enthusiastic about Bungie’s upcoming Marathon reboot.
Its gameplay reveal in April quickly invited Concord comparisons and the responses to alpha playtests was poor enough that Marathon was indefinitely delayed from its intended 2025 launch. On top of that, Bungie was accused of plagiarising artwork, with reports suggesting that studio morale was at an all time low, as it was said that Marathon ‘cannot afford’ to fail.
While it feels like Sony’s been walking back its live service game aspirations lately, with many unannounced projects getting canned, it’s committed to pushing Marathon out the door anyway, as the game now has a new release date and price.
How much will Marathon on PS5 cost?
Despite most live service games opting for free-to-play models, Sony seems really hung up on pushing its live service games as premium releases – just as it has with Helldivers 2 and Concord.
Marathon was never going to be sold at full price though and per a new PlayStation Blog post we now know the game will cost £34.99 in the UK.
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It also has a new release window of March 2026, although it’s somewhat eyebrow-raising that, with it only three months away, Sony apparently has yet to settle on an exact date.
Sony also charged £34.99 for Concord when it launched in 2024. And while pricing wasn’t the only issue people had with the game, it certainly didn’t help.
Concord’s sales were dire, estimated to have only been 25,000 copies in the first week, which was enough for Sony to not only pull the plug on the game but also kill developer Firewalk Studios.
For Sony to also charge £34.99 for Marathon suggests the company doesn’t think the pricing was responsible for, or even a contributing factor, to Concord’s failure.
It could also be because Marathon is an established brand and already comes with a dedicated fanbase, but it’s hardly a household name and even if you do know the previous games, which were originally Mac exclusives, the new title seems to have very little in common with them.
Just look at the new video Bungie put up, which highlights new additions and improvements made since the playtests, such as reworked visuals, the addition of proximity chat, and the option to play solo.
The likes/dislikes ratio, at the time of writing, is a near even split of 4,100 likes to 4,000 dislikes, although that’s on the PlayStation channel upload. Things seem more positive on the official Marathon channel, where the same video has 16,000 likes compared to 3,200 dislikes.
Even if perception has improved among some of its audience, Marathon costing anything already limits its reach, though Bungie will be running a free preview session the weekend before launch.
Plus, unlike Concord, Marathon won’t be limited to PlayStation 5 and PC. It’s also seeing an Xbox Series X/S launch though we’re not sure that’ll make much of a difference with how poor Xbox sales have been.
It is possible Marathon could ride the success of Arc Raiders, which has helped popularise the extraction shooter genre, but that game will also be its stiffest competition.
Arc Raiders made a much stronger first impression and unless it bungles things completely in the next three months, it’d be difficult for Marathon to win over entrenched Arc Raiders fans.
Regardless, Bungie is in dire need of a win, especially now that Sony has written off some of its $3.6 billion buyout of the studio as a loss and formally acknowledged that Destiny 2 hasn’t been meeting expectations.
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