Marathon is Bungie’s next big multiplayer blockbuster and its first live-service launch as part of PlayStation. The game hails from a genre—extraction shooters—that’s never been for the faint of heart but from a big-budget studio that doesn’t do anything on the cheap. So how much will Marathon cost when it comes out in the fall? Bungie isn’t saying, yet.
Today’s big gameplay reveal showcase for the sci-fi successor to the ‘90s FPS trilogy gave us a September 23 release date and a good overview of what will set Bungie’s take on the hardcore PvPvE genre apart. But how many people will show up at launch for the studio behind Halo and Destiny? Marathon’s price will be a big factor there. The Sony-owned company still hasn’t said what the game will cost but it doesn’t sound like it will be free.
“The kicker here is that Marathon is going to launch as a premium product, meaning players will be asked to pay full price,” reports GameSpot’s Tamoor Hussain, who recently went hands-on with the shooter. “Based on what I experienced and was told, it’ll have a battle pass, three maps (with a fourth arriving shortly after launch); fun but no-frills gameplay; a story that currently is all very vague in its nature and unclear in its implementation; and a character-progression system that doesn’t yet show signs of offering a meaningful sense of growth.”
Charging $7o for what’s described above, as Forbes’ Paul Tassi notes, seems out of the question, and Bungie later clarified that it won’t be doing that stating, “Marathon will not be a full-priced title.” The most obvious guess from there is that Marathon will be $40. That seems to be the popular new hedge for premium games that need to reach a massive audience. That previously rumored number is what Helldivers 2 was priced at last year. It’s also $10 less than what Bungie charged for Destiny 2’s big The Final Shape expansion that same year.
But $40 is also what Sony charged for Concord, the infamously failed hero shooter that so few people played that it was retroactively unreleased and fully refunded within two weeks of launch. A big talking point around that game was whether it would have had a better chance if it had been free-to-play, or at least free with PlayStation Plus. It’s impossible to know now, but that question will seemingly haunt every new live-service shooter releasing in Concord’s wake.
At the same time, Bungie has never given its games away for free before. Even Destiny 2, which currently has a free version, locks most of its content, especially newer stuff, behind a premium paywall. And most fans can understand why. Games like Destiny 2, or Marathon for that matter, don’t come cheap. With blockbusters like Spider-Man 2 needing to sell over 7 million copies just to break even, microtransaction shops alone are unlikely to pay the bill unless your live-service game becomes a Marvel Rivals-sized hit overnight. And honestly, Marathon is looking a little too hardcore for that at the moment.
But unlike Destiny 2, Marathon is a PvPvE game seemingly without anything in the way of a traditional story-based campaign. It’s already working from within the confines of a more niche genre. In a world where most other PvP games are free-to-play, charging anything might be one step too far when it comes to getting players on the sidelines to come in and check out the newest project from the studio responsible for their favorite college dorm Halo 3 party back in the day.
Bungie and Sony are likely banking on that lingering brand power to get people to show up on day one. Whether it’s enough to also get them to pay is another thing entirely.
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