Could the Next Big PlayStation Shooter Flop Like Concord?

Sony hasn’t had a ton of success with shooters. While Helldivers II is still going strong, the company’s last foray into the genre crashed out two weeks after launch spelled the end of developer Firewalk Studios.

Sony’s acquisition of Halo and Destiny creators Bungie should have been the shot in the arm the company needed to get back on top. But things aren’t looking so rosy, prompting concerns that we could soon have another Concord situation on our hands.

Bungie Is Bringing Back Marathon

Before the success of Halo: Combat Evolved on Microsoft’s original Xbox console, Bungie was a Macintosh developer. The company was recognized for earlier titles like 1993’s Pathways into Darkness and then set about developing a first-person shooter for the Apple Macintosh (and later Apple Pippin) called Marathon.

The game stood out at a time when the first-person shooter was a relatively new phenomenon. The game was technically impressive for the time, with dynamic lighting, free mouse look, and a motion sensor depicting enemy locations.

The game’s story isn’t a million miles away from Halo either. The game takes place in 2794 aboard an earth colony ship known as the UESC Marathon. You play the role of a security officer when an alien attack renders much of the ship inoperable. You’ll have to fight and fix things up if the mission is to be a success.

Bungie’s success with Marathon saw two more entries (with the second game receiving a Windows 95 release) before the studio was snapped up by Microsoft in 2000, a year after Halo: Combat Evolved was first shown at Macworld Expo 1999. After being cut loose from Microsoft in 2007, the company went on to develop Destiny and its sequel, uncoupled itself from a 10-year publishing deal with Activision Blizzard (with Destiny rights intact), only to get snapped up by Sony in 2022.

This is where we currently find ourselves, with the company developing a modern-day sequel to the game that helped put it on the radar all those years ago. This also happens to be a game that Sony is pinning a lot of hopes on, considering the high-profile failure of online hero shooter Concord in 2024.

The Shooter Market Is Huge But Crowded

In the years since Marathon’s 1994 release, the first-person shooter market has exploded. Countless titles have reinvented the genre, from Quake to Half-Life, through to modern multiplayer hits like Overwatch and Valorant.

As a result of the genre’s enduring popularity, everyone wants a piece of the pie. Unfortunately, there’s only so much pie to go around. Standing out in a sea of highly polished and technically impressive games is tough, even for a company like Bungie. Not only do you have to produce something that people want to play, you have to tempt them away from their current favorites.

Bungie’s Marathon reboot is a little different. This is a multiplayer first-person extraction shooter with a hero component. It takes place on the planet settled by the UESC Marathon that featured in earlier Marathon titles, Tau Ceti, after a period of unrest during which many of the settlers disappeared. Within this colony, some humans have given up their bodies in favor of enhanced cybernetic versions and become known as Runners. These Runners have to scavenge the colony for resources, artifacts, and other loot before getting out safely.

Marathon is arguably the highest-profile extraction shooter to date. Though Ubisoft’s The Division and its “Dark Zone” gameplay is often credited with “inventing” the genre, extraction shooters have reached new heights with games like Escape from Tarkov and Delta Force winning over fans and dominating the streaming charts for years now.

Bungie and Sony are chasing this success, and when it comes to gaming trends that’s not necessarily a position you want to find yourself in. In fact, this specific criticism was leveled at Concord even before its release. In that case, Sony and Firewalk Studios were chasing success in the hero shooter space, a genre dominated by the likes of Overwatch and Apex Legends (and since, Marvel Rivals).

One could argue that you need equal parts vision to innovate, and equal parts luck to find yourself in the right place at the right time. Hades arrived right around the point where the world went roguelite mad, Fortnite stepped into the comfortable niche hollowed out by PUBG and its contemporaries, while REPO is enjoying its time in the spotlight after games Phasmophobia helped to firmly establish the “frights with friends” co-op horror genre.

Given how long games take to make and how costly they have become, you run the very real risk of missing a trend entirely when you come from behind. In the case of Marathon, things are looking even worse following Bungie’s announcement of an indefinite delay in June 2025.

Many Similar Titles Are Free-to-Play

It costs nothing to jump into some of the biggest shooters in the world right now. This includes Call of Duty: Warzone, Apex Legends, Delta Force, Fortnite, and Marvel Rivals. These are the games that Marathon will be going up against.

The only problem is that Marathon won’t be a free-to-play game. The only thing that Bungie has announced with regards to price right now is that Marathon will be a “premium” product but not a “full-priced title”—whatever that means. This was all announced in April long before the project’s indefinite delay, so who knows what will end up happening.

Once again, this is reminiscent of comments made about Concord in 2024. Marvel Rivals launched in December, only three months after the Concord shutdown, and it has become a force to be reckoned with in the space. While the game has managed to earn itself a loyal fanbase, the free-to-play model plays a significant role.

Let’s not pretend that these games aren’t highly profitable operations. Though gamers have been soured on game-breaking pay-to-win mechanics, cosmetics and battle passes continue to ensure that these games turn a profit. Without this, free-to-play games cannot survive and go the way of Rumbleverse and Knockout City.

It would be refreshing to see a game like Marathon succeed in a market where the biggest games trade on FOMO and other predatory monetization practices. After all, Bungie saw massive success with Destiny 2, a game that started out as a premium product, transitioned to free-to-play, and still has content being produced for it in 2025 (with further expansions planned for 2026).

Marathon Is Already Mired in Controversy

That success, however, feels like a million miles away right now. One thing that Bungie is struggling with, outside of carrying Sony’s torch, is its rocky reputation.

In May, Bungie concluded its closed alpha playtest after inviting fans and the press to try out an early build of the game. While it’s important not to draw too many conclusions based on a pre-release version of the game, many testers came away with lukewarm first impressions.

Most agreed that the gunplay is solid, but doesn’t stand out (many noting that they expected more from the studio responsible for Destiny). Some queried the need for a “hero” approach to an extraction shooter. Others complained that the game felt brutally hard, particularly for solo players. It seems that Bungie made some odd choices too, like including strong aim assist for PC players (something that was “fixed” during the beta).

The wider community reaction was largely a negative one, with player numbers dropping to around 20% of what the game managed at launch and Twitch streams dropping off in turn. Many queried whether there was enough content here to justify a premium release, something that Bungie had already asserted. This reaction led to the eventual delaying of Marathon indefinitely.

But the bad news doesn’t end there. In May, news broke of an artist called Antireal revealing that Bungie had plagiarized their work, with designs appearing essentially unchanged not only in gameplay footage but in the game’s press kit and on the homepage. This isn’t the first time Bungie has been accused of doing this either.

Bungie responded by claiming that “a former Bungie artist included these in a texture sheet that was ultimately used in-game” and that the company is “committed to do right by the artist.” It’s hard to ignore the fact that Marathon’s entire visual style—glitchy text, strong typefaces, bright colors, retro modernism—seems to be heavily influenced by this artist.

Can Marathon Still Succeed?

Marathon’s failure or success is far from guaranteed. I’m hopeful that Bungie can rescue the project, pay the artist they wronged, and replicate the sort of success that Destiny enjoyed. Marathon certainly has a few things going for it that Concord lacked, despite its rough first impressions and the bad taste that a plagiarism controversy can leave in your mouth.

Given Bungie’s track record, the studio has proven its ability to create interesting worlds. The Marathon series pulls from a body of lore that has already carried three whole games, even if that was 30 years ago. Marathon’s price point will likely have a big bearing on its success, but it would be good to see a pay-to-play shooter succeed among the sea of free-to-play titles.

Unlike Concord, Marathon will be a cross-platform title from launch with both Xbox Series X|S and Windows versions in the works. It also stands a chance of being the first extraction shooter to take the genre mainstream on consoles. Tarkov has very much carved out its hardcore PC gamer niche, and Delta Force still hasn’t launched on consoles as of writing. Is there a chance that Marathon could do for extraction shooters what Fortnite did for battle royales?

Maybe. Only time will tell.