Paul Tassi has shared an interesting rumor about Bungie’s upcoming extraction shooter, Marathon.
In a new YouTube video shortly after he reported on Marathon rumors for Bloomberg, Tassi said this:
People have been calling this Concord 2.0. I think people forget just how historic the failure of Concord is. It did not hit 700 concurrent seen players and was shut down in two weeks.
That said, I don’t expect this to be a success. As I’ve been saying, it might not get 700, but it is going to get way, way less than they’re hoping for.
I heard this needed to be in the top 5 of NPD sales for the year if it’s going to be a success or considered a success. Crazy! No way. There’s no way.
As an additional note, NPD, short for National Purchase Diary, is a marketing research firm. They rebranded to Circana, but is still widely known as NPD.
Tassi went on to say, because of this sales goal, Marathon wasn’t going to go free-to-play. He didn’t specify if Sony or Bungie set this goal.
Tassi reported for Bloomberg that morale inside the company was in free-fall after the plagiarism scandal exploded. But even before that scandal came up, gamers were already being widely critical about Marathon’s game design. As Tassi explained, this is not really the same situation as Concord, and there’s enough merit in Marathon as it is that he’s sure there will be fans.
But of course, the Concord bar is so low that it should be easy to see that Marathon could clear it and still turn out to be a flop. As Tassi explained, Bungie didn’t really do enough to make this notion of a casual extraction shooter engaging and fun enough, for either real newcomers and casual players, or extraction shooter fans who would already be dedicated to Escape from Tarkov or other games.
Many gamers also made unfavorable comparisons to Arc Raiders, another extraction shooter that is also in public playtests, and those who are able to play it are giving it rave reviews so far. It should be noted that Arc Raiders isn’t even in Early Access, so its reception can change in a matter of months.
Tassi concluded that there’s just no path or method to make Marathon a success. This is at least the part where Marathon is like Concord; Sony expected both games to be huge successes, without understanding what made live service games popular and successful. And by the time they found out that they weren’t getting these games right, they had already invested so much money into them that cancelling would cost too much. But now they also know that they’re not releasing a game that’s going to do well.
But then again, if Concord’s designs were divisive for being unlikable, there were real fans of Marathon’s art style. And then that became the problem because of the plagiarism scandal. We want to believe there are people in Sony who will care about the people making games, who will hold themselves accountable and/or take risks to fix this and make Marathon a success. It’s now up to Sony and Bungie to do what we expect, or surprise us with some good news.
