We have some interesting rumors about Bungie’s and Sony’s current plans for Marathon.
As shared by Paul Tassi for Forbes, Sony is locked into selling Marathon for $ 40. That’s the same price that Sony gave for Helldivers 2 and Concord, their biggest hit and worst flub in the live service space, both coming out last year. As Tassi explained, it would be too late to redesign the game to make it free-to-play, but there really are no plans to do so anyway.
Bungie recently revealed that they would be dropping the NDA requirement for content creators to show more of Marathon, and Tassi has interesting anecdotes on how that played out behind the scenes. We reported last October 2024 that content creators started posting that they got to visit Bungie, but they couldn’t talk about what they saw. There are a lot of these YouTubers and Twitch streamers who already knew about Marathon for months, but were constrained to talk about it.
Bungie’s announcement is that Closed Alpha commences this week, at April 23 and ends on May 4, 2025. Tassi says that the Closed Alpha is a real technical test, particularly to see how many players they can handle before it breaks. Because of this, Bungie needs to limit the number of players for now, and they also don’t want too many outsider players to spread FUD about their efforts to deliberately break the game in testing.
Bungie changed their mind after seeing the public reaction to the initial gameplay reveal. While some would argue that the game does look good, and that some complaints are not in good faith, Bungie ultimately chose to make a goodwill gesture to win gamers over. Tassi believes this gesture is actually working, and that the Open Beta will be coming in August. It may be timed around the time as the pre-order date, in the lead up to its launch in September 23, 2025.
Sony and Bungie have been careful about approaching this game’s launch, and it’s clear that they’re doing everything they can to avoid a repeat of not only the Concord situation, but a The Final Shape situation as well. And if you think about it, it’s transparently easy to be collecting feedback and ensuring you have an interested fanbase to ensure Marathon doesn’t become Concord. Bungie’s real worry is likely that they may make something that doesn’t really live up to their fan’s expectations, which is the much more likely scenario that they most recently experienced with The Final Shape.
Bungie and Sony must certainly be cognizant that the Switch 2 is making an impressive enough showing that its launch games, alongside Grand Theft Auto 6, can potentially take attention and players away from Marathon. We’re about to find out in the next three weeks if Marathon has what it takes to draw gamers in, or if Sony and Bungie should consider making new changes yet again.
With the messy development history that Marathon already has, Bungie and Sony definitely don’t want to go through all of that over again.
