Bungie’s Marathon: Will the Lightning Strike Twice?

[Music] So, Marathon, I'm going to play a little trailer release in the background. So, we finally got to see what Bungie has been up to with Marathon. They revealed gameplay trailers on April 12th, which was this past Saturday. The game is scheduled for release on September 23rd, 2025, across PC and console. It'll have crossplay and crossave support. I'm not sure. I saw a price point, but it will not be free to play. Anyone want to check me on that? $40. $40. $40. Okay. Closed alpha is set to run April 23rd to May 4th exclusively for North American players aged 18 or over. I think they're directing people to their Discord to get access to that. So, that's in general the overview. Phil, I I know that you've done a pretty deep dive. Do you want to take it from here? Yeah. So, I think there's the marathon piece which is interesting. I wanted to take a moment

and look at the extraction shooter lineage, which I think is an important part of this conversation. And I think sometimes we misframe extraction shooters as what comes next after battle royale as though it's kind of like this next innovation that's just been sitting around. And when you look at where I I would argue the split was in Day Z with Escape from Torov going in One Direction. Now, to be clear, there's no literal connection between the two. I'm just arguing design influence here, but if you look at Escape from Torov and H1Z1, which branched off from Daisy around 2015, again, I'm arguing from a design perspective. Escape from Torov starts to have all these additional iterations. You've got Hunt, you've got Vigor, you've got this AAA cycle we kind of go through in 2122, the cycle, Hazard Zone, which was on Battlefield, a lot of fun stories from that, DMZ, which was in Call of Duty. You've got kind of this return to core, although I'm still trying to figure out what's really happening. extraction shooters now, but Dark and Darker's I would argue not necessarily a mainstream game. And neither is Grey Zone Warfare, which we were covering last year, which is a premium extraction title that is

military sim of course for the Steam audience that's done really well. So, I think you've got kind of this branch that is actually closer to survival more than it is anything else looking back at the Day Z roots. And then I think you've got this other branch which started to become battle royale. And so, I think it's just wrong to think of extraction shooters as the next iteration of battle royale. it's a separate branch. And so when we think about Marathon, I think you really have to situate it in the extraction shooter branch, if that's the design decisions that they're going to make. And the more I looked into it before I got on the podcast, I was hoping that they were going to make more radical design decisions to really think about how to reimagine whatever the core of Extraction is or really to rebaptize it as the next iteration of Battle Royale. But seems like they've taken almost every Extraction shooter staple and are putting it in this game. And so I'm I'm actually struggling to see this one coming out as a winner, but I would really love for it to. So it's going to be 18 players per map, six crews of three, about 25 minute

match cycles. So that's pretty snappy for extraction shooter. This was the most surprising thing I heard in an interview. Bungie expects the typical map survival rate to sit under 50%. That is a brutal loop. Now there's respawning in this game, so I don't know if we're considering that final number, but man, that's that's a stake in the ground. That's That's certainly not accessibility. I would argue. Ranked play on the road map but not at launch. I hate games that do this. And even when you artificially hold it back, it's absolutely silly. You just are not showing my rating to me even though you're doing ELO on the back end. There's no social space either. I'll point that out. That's usually an extraction shooter staple. Usually there's a 3D map where you might be interacting with what they call contract vendors, which are tasks that you're going in the world to doing. They have a menu. Thank god. I will give them credit for that. Thank god there's a menu. You know, they have the oldfashioned contract system as I was talking about. It looks like they're making some interesting choices on the skill trees. So, we'll track where that happens. The other thing I'll just mention just, you know, from an economy perspective,

extraction shooters are also fascinating and they're going to have a million problems trying to manage the shooters because similar to something like Zingo Poker, there's an increase in assets on the supply side whenever a player enters a match or an item spawns and they drop it, right? There's player-to-player transfer. And when there's player-to-player transfer, that means you can have inflation over time if people are like just, let's say a million DAU join and then they leave, you know, half of them leave tomorrow. There's going to be an excess of supply which moves the equilibrium quite a bit. So anyways, there's a bunch of economy stuff you got to do to get this one right. So good luck to Bungie on like buying the right econ. Should they put tariffs in the game? Oh, well, they actually kind of do have that. This is kind of what you do to reduce supply. Like if you're an MMO, you do durability. That's kind of a tariff on use. We've talked about that. And then Tarov can basically degrade items into zero. The only thing that I can say about this game after listening to some coverage from some of the uh enthusiast people on the podcast is that this thing is coming in hot. This is coming in real hot, dude. Like a September release seems [ __ ] ambitious, dude. I I I don't think this thing is fully baked at

all. And so I think it's going to be like a work in progress, which for Bungie that's bad. For Sony, that's bad. And for the customers that are going to be really loyal to Bungie, that's bad. So, I mean, God, they're also going to go up against GTA potentially. Well, at least they put a stake in the ground. Adam, I know you can only say so much, but what can you say? Look, there's amazing people at Bungie. I think they're in a really tough spot, and I think the the September date, I agree with you that this is definitely coming in hot, but I am absolutely rooting for them. I think the gameplay trailer unfortunately got a little bit off on the wrong foot. So, I really hope they can win over fans with a strong alpha and really by bringing their differentiation front and center. the gameplay coverage they've had though so far that's really been the missing piece but overall I am agreed on your assessment around the genre right like the bar to break out as extraction and PvP right now is a highly differentiated shooter we talked this with Chris on the PVP panel last year this has to create

that Elden Ring moment for the genre right first game that makes it the first recommendable game that squads of friends all jump in and art style unfortunately alone can't do this. I'd almost argue that like Hell Divers, despite being PvE, created that moment. It was a big pivot away from PvP, but kept the extraction shooter elements. Just no one really call it extraction because it was PvE and of course it didn't sustain. It was a completely different model. But in general, I've just seen PvE VP having a ceiling and remaining niche. Tarov was so core and games that attempted to bring it to be more PvE, more casual just haven't created the same interest. And as far as I know, I think COD DMZ has been the biggest success like from chatting people close to the project. It was successful for COD as a platform and did draw strong attach and retention. The blocker of continuing it was more around platform and engine and team studio, but I expect the DMZ2. So I do expect extraction to be more of a mode within a

shooter platform and standalones will continue to struggle with unicels. But I think like the philosophical discussion still here is like when can a game meaningfully break out of a paradigm shift versus live within the ceiling, right? Like PUBG to Fortnite, CS to Valerant, Magic to Hearstone. Like where are the extraction shooter breakouts? Where are the rogue likes even on PC console? How do they break out of the ceiling that they're in? And I think it has to create that Elden Ring moment. That's the most important part. there hasn't been enough of a win in the extraction shooter space which is something that I've always pushed back against people trying to make it is that like Escape from Torov has certainly made enough money over its life cycle despite a lot of things going against it in terms of distribution development cycle but when we compare it to like PUBG which is the most successful game on Steam ever like it had the highest PSU as a paid game not just within the paid category like including freetoplay games that had the highest PSU peak of all time it's very

easy for me to see why you'd want to throw more and more capital at a genre like that when you have a spark like that. But I just struggle to see what is the huge win we're chasing with extraction shooter money. The appeal and what drew people to Extraction from a strategy perspective was with battle royale, it had no progression, right? Like even people within Fortnite working on Apex struggled to say like, "Hey, we'd love to be able to add RPG elements to this game." That's what people real go. Yeah. But it hasn't, right? It's still it still hasn't given meaningful progression. This is to say like let's pull some progression elements into this game and then it starts to look more like an extraction shooter. I could not agree more with you that the key thing that everyone likes about extraction shooters is that you've got meta progression. You got out of round progression between sessions. But that's not stakes, right? And that's what people keep going back to with extraction shooter is that it's really the stakes that define this genre. And maybe it's the stakes that define your genre, maybe it doesn't. But the thing that you're still trying to capture, I would argue, is out of round progression. Like that's the thing I

think shooters should take away from all this activity. Like that's I would argue is where the paradigm shift is, not in the stake piece. Like that goes back to let's break out extraction as like a a theme and just say let's create the Call of Duty 4 Modern Warfare moment where you start to add an RPG progression wrapper around PvP and it becomes like meaningful progress. Now you can create real retention outside of rounds, outside of extraction. I agree with that thesis. Like I I hope it exists. I just I would like to see more of it. I don't think the stakes and losing things is going to unlock the next wave in this genre. I don't think that's what's interesting about this genre is the stakes. It's the progression. The stakes is what's interesting in the genre to the existing players within it. Correct. Correct. But I don't think that's going to vault them success. You're saying like all the people that have set sat around the fringe of the genre will never come in given the stakes. Given that I would argue that whenever we have a monster success, you know, there's a million things that could have been causal for that that thing's success. You know, maybe maybe it's, you know,

this thing caused that thing or that thing has a bigger influence than that thing. And part of what the market process does is try to like test, okay, was it this thing or was it that thing? We try to understand over time what's driven success for some of these genres. And to me, the stakes thing has not driven enough success. Like increasing the stakes has not increased the TAM of this genre. I don't think we can argue that's a causal factor. like the Tarov hideout that you continue invest in that you have a lot of your resources like that's really interesting. A lot of these meta progression elements I just I wish we would double down on those. I agree. Yeah, absolutely. what I can say from my silly marketing perspective and you know obviously I'm never going to have the immense deep knowledge of the actual gameplay but from a lot of what I've seen is that this type of gameplay this extraction shooter specific market is very niche and is likely not going to be or is a challenging area to be like outsized on a revenue opportunity to recoup what's likely a lot of spend and a lot of marketing on this the second thing that

I see is that you know the marathon IP and I know a lot of people are like it's an IP it's like well for a very small group of people so you know you have to rely a little bit on the bungee brand and the bungee love you don't get the CPI like IP bump that we normally talk about here because this IP is not really known to the next generation audience what I do love and personally the art style is unique however I wonder if it's polarizing depending on what region you're in. And you know, if also if I'm in an attraction shooter in this neon color palette, it it feels like it's like a giant glow stick saying like, "Shoot me, shoot me, shoot me, kill me, kill me, kill me." Like at a rave. So, I wonder about like that art style actually mixed with the gameplay. And then I actually just wanted to do a brief like marketing team message. Your cinematic trailer is like a work of art and it should be because it's an eight minute piece of just beauty from Oscar-winning filmmaker Alberto Blegro.

And this might be a little bit more of a technicality and we're actually coming at it I think in the video at the end is the end card just kind of like runs through super quickly and then I'm off to the next video. You got to hold on the end card and tell me what you want me to do. it goes by so quick, you know, you got to just hold on that stuff. So, you know, that's my nitpick. Um, one other super nitpick I think would be I'm really not sure what the unique selling point and differentiation is from the gameplay trailers that I was watching. You know, I I'm not really sensing from this like, hey, besides a cool art style, what's kind of new or different? Did you guys like have a sense of that when you watched it? I actually reached out to some old colleagues and shared that. I think my hope is through the alpha and through their upcoming beats they were able to lean into that more. But I agree with you, the cinematic trailer was a absolute work of art. I know the team was always very excited to

be working with that director and to see it come together was pretty amazing. Oh, so so incredible. If I could have a budget and to do something like that, I would love it. But yeah, then I watched the gameplay trailers and I was like, "Oo, that's how that looks actually in the game." Yeah, I totally agree. That's the feedback to the team is how do you bring that differentiation front and center but in terms of the genre and the cap that the genre is like this is known this is the risk with going after extraction shooters is how do you break out of this ceiling hence refer back to point one that I made that is this is a a niche genre that is difficult one other note that needs to be said is that the gameplay is going to be amazing right like that's what Bungie nails every time they make a game is that like the way they make the guns the way they make the momentto moment gameplay is always absolutely phenomenal and that What a lot of people were talking about, you know, on the podcast is that yeah, the game is still amazing. [Music]