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Betweendisconcerting development reportsand a volatile industry, I admit I’ve been kind of pessimistic aboutMarathonfor a while.
My Destiny 2 friends and I have repeatedly exchanged worries about whether Marathon might just beef it Concord-style.
It plays well reallywell.
It’s probably the most polished extraction shooter there is.
I don’t think premium pricing is a death blow.
Well, $70 might be.
But Marathon doesn’thaveto be free.
Lots of extraction shooters aren’t free.
Hunt: Showdown 1896 is $30.
The list goes on.
But Marathon is not just competing with extraction shooters.
It wants to be “the next hit PvP experience,” Bungie said in a presentation.
It’s also competing with free and established giants like Warzone, PUBG, Valorant, and Apex Legends.
Helldivers 2 was lightning in a bottle and it ran away with 2024.
It’s not about genre when it comes to competition.
I think it’s about cost and expectations.
Concord rolled up with a worse and more expensive product that predictably cratered.
And yet, when it comes to Marathon, itisalso about genre.
Extraction shooters are brutal.
They are not as big as the battle royales and hero shooters of the world for a reason.
You have to love the pain.
(Maybe pre-release play tests will help onboard people?)
And Marathon is good, at least so far.
I want to play it, and I’m not a PvP-coded person.
Like Helldivers 2 and unlike Concord, it has cleared the first quality hurdle.
It’s well on its way to justifying a premium price, whatever that magic number may be.
And a marathon indeed
But how will people see Marathon?
To be fair, Marathon has already solved some of Destiny’s PvP problems.
It has fully dedicated servers.
It has full crossplay and cross-save, which is always nice.
It certainly needs to be.
There’s already been talk of battle passes, seasons, and cosmetics in Marathon.
We don’t have specific prices here either, but Destiny 2 does not set the most encouraging precedent.
This is where genre stops mattering again.
Peoplewill, rightly, look at how expensive and how available battle passes and cosmetics are in competing games.
I hope Concord scaredthe shitout of Bungie and Sony.
Even good games can just die, often in a matter of weeks.
That possibility is real, too.
But until we have all the specifics, I’ll be fighting that pessimism.
Here are all the bignew games of 2025and beyond.
