The mood at Bungie regarding the upcoming game Marathon is “not great,” they say.
In the latest episode of Skill Up's Friends Per Second podcast, Bloomberg journalist Jason Schreier was asked about Bungie's “temperature check” regarding Marathon.
“Not so great, from what I’ve heard,” Schreier replied.
“There's a reason it was scheduled for this year and got pushed back a whole year, and the people I've spoken to are a little pessimistic about whether it will even make the currently scheduled date. But we'll see. I don't know exactly when that will be, sometime in 2025, I'm not sure.
He added: “Yeah, I heard the mood on that isn't great, at least a few months ago.”
Schreier also noted that there was a shakeup in the game's leadership earlier this year, when game director Christopher Barrett and executive producer Carrie Gouskos left the project.
Schreier gave his opinion on how the game is likely to be received upon release, saying he doesn't think Bungie's fanbase would be excited about a PvP extraction shooter and is concerned that further development could lead to a similar problem to Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League.
“Suicide Squad started development in 2017 when live services were the hot new trend. Because of the sunk costs and the endless delays, there was no real interest or willingness to cancel it since they had spent so much money on it. There was just a belief that 'we want to put this out, it's going to be cool.' So it came out and totally flopped,” he explained.
“I'm worried that Marathon will end up in a similar situation, even though it's been in development for a while. Development started when extraction shooters were super hot, I don't know if that's still the case.
“And now, because they committed so much money and because it was the project that was furthest along as opposed to all their other incubation bets, they're really putting a lot into it, and I'm just not sure it has much of a chance of being successful.
“But then again, you know. If you had asked me in January, I would have said, 'Yeah, Helldivers 2, this game is going to flop so damn much, it just looks like a disaster,' and of course it turned out to be the biggest thing ever, so I like to report and not make predictions so much.”