Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier has shared some surprising new revelations about Bungie’s next big title, Marathon.
He was a guest on the latest episode of the Friends Per Second podcast, hosted by YouTuber Skill Up, to talk about all things Bungie. He started opening up when co-host Lucy James asked him point blank what he heard about the game.
Jason started off on a dreadful note, saying:
“Not great, from what I’ve heard. There’s a reason it was planned for this year, and slipped a whole year. People I’ve been talking to have been 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.
Yeah, the sentiment I’ve heard is not great around it, at least as of a few months ago. “
Later in the conversation, Jason pointed out that Marathon had a big leadership shakeup as of last April. Their director, Christopher Barrett, left Bungie. Carrie Gouskos was Marathon‘s executive producer, and became senior director of development before she also left last April.
We should be clear here that Jason has to be citing publicly available information, since this would be quite the big issue if Bungie kept it under wraps and it was all being revealed for the first time. For those curious, Bungie has assigned Joe Ziegler to be the current director at Marathon. Joe joined the studio all the way back in 2022, and was previously the game director for Riot Games’ Valorant. Joe has allegedly already changed Marathon, to be a combination of a hero shooter and an extraction shooter.
Jason himself made an interesting comparison to Marathon, and not Valorant, but Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League. Jason describes the development of Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League as a situation where they started when live service was the hot new thing, and couldn’t decide to cancel the project because of endless delays and the sunk cost fallacy. Rocksteady and WB Games were sure that the game was going to be received well, that they refused to turn back, and that’s why Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League is where it is now.
Jason then says this:
“I’m worried about Marathon being in a similar situation where it’s been in development for a while. It entered 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 Jason ends this little thread of conversation by revealing that he also didn’t believe that Helldivers 2 was going to be successful, and he felt he was proven wrong there.
Skill Up himself pointed out that Bungie could have made Marathon a smaller project they could build up if it turned out to be successful, and that certainly seemed like a more reasonable course of action. CD Projekt RED and Riot Games made such cuts to their own smaller projects in the past two years, and while they also suffered losses then, they were able to cut off the damage earlier too.
We’re certainly concerned for Bungie’s future as a whole, but as Jason said, his information is a few months old. He may not have knowledge on how well the project is now going under Joe Ziegler. If you like Bungie and Valorant, you may hold out for some hope that this project could come together out of unplanned and unexpected providence in the end.
