In my 24 years of covering games, I struggle to think of a more startling failure than Concord, which this week announced it would be going offline to "explore options" that will "better reach our players." At that moment it had been out for just 11 days. Of course, plenty of higher profile games have launched disastrously, and for all sorts of reasons—but what makes Concord unique is how fast it flamed out. Right now, the Steam concurrent data shows that there are just 56 people playing, having peaked at 697 around launch. By any realistic metric Concord was dead on arrival.
What's also remarkable is that Concord presumably had the deep pockets of Sony to draw on, after the publisher acquired Firewalk Studios last April. Although Firewalk is a new developer, it's packed with industry veterans, notably including several who worked in senior gameplay roles at Bungie on Destiny 2. That DNA connection is partly why I've been thinking about Marathon this week, and how shaky its own prospects seem, but there are other similarities too.
So I expected Concord to struggle, and Sony must have had the same inkling given the lack of marketing support.
Tyler Wilde wrote about why Concord had landed with such a thud last week, and I'm not here to relitigate those reasons, but I agree that it's a conflation of many causes: The aesthetic was too safe to stand out. The combat lacked a hook that made you rush to tell your friends about it. The retail pricing in a world of free-to-play games felt like a wild misreading of the room.
So I expected Concord to struggle, and Sony must have had the same inkling given how little marketing support I saw around the launch. It's a brutal reminder that, in this market, being an okay game is nowhere near enough to break through.
What I don't think is true is the idea that Concord is the canary in the mine for live service games as a model. Take another look at the Steam numbers and you'll see the likes of Apex Legends, Rainbow Six Siege and now Deadlock ticking along nicely. What we can say is that it's getting harder and harder to persuade players to abandon their current 'forever' game in favor of spending time with something else. To a degree all games face the same battle for attention, but there are few genres as brutally competitive as online PvP shooters.
All of which adds to the challenge facing Marathon, and is why if I were an accountant at Sony, I would be sweating Gjallarhorn rockets right now. Obviously, I'm not going to pre-judge the quality of a game that we've only seen a CG trailer of [above], but I've always had a nagging worry about Marathon's fate, not least who it's actually supposed to be for. Here's what we know for certain about Marathon:
As you would expect in the wake of major layoffs, there's been plenty of reporting around morale at Bungie, and none of it has been good. There have been murmurings that Marathon as a project is not in a great place. On August 9, Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier told the Friends Per Second podcast: "[Marathon] sentiment is not great, there's a reason it slipped a whole year and some developers don't even think it'll even hit its current deadline."
It would be little wonder if Sony took a very hands-on approach with the studio it bought for $3.6B
A source I spoke with confirmed that the game has seen substantial scope changes since announcement, and was sceptical about its chances. They added that Marathon had seen multiple senior departures, even before Barrett's removal, and that in the wake of what's happened with Concord, some are worried about what it will mean for Marathon.
We've also seen reporting from multiple outlets that "if Bungie misses financial targets by too wide a margin, Sony has the right to dissolve the current board and take full control." Given the turbulence around Bungie, which includes The Final Shape missing its financial goals despite being universally acclaimed, it would be little wonder if Sony took a very hands-on approach with the studio it bought for $3.6B in January 2022. You can also imagine that the failure of Concord—also a live service game, also PvP-only, also in development for many years—has severely spooked Sony.
Let's put all the chaos surrounding Bungie and Destiny 2 to the side and imagine Marathon arrives next year and is a solid take on the extraction shooter. Would that be enough to pull in the kind of numbers Bungie needs? Escape from Tarkov, the dominant force in the genre, exploded in May 2020 after a major update (a "wipe" in Tarkov terms), passing 200k concurrents according to Battlestate Games COO Nikita Buyanov.
It should be noted though, that mid-2020 was pretty much the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, and that was a time when multiplayer games saw a huge boost of activity from people being stuck at home in front of their PCs. It was also a period in which many studios placed big bets on expanding and greenlighting new projects, and those that failed have led to the layoffs across game development in the last couple of years.
Although we can't know for sure when work on Marathon began, the fact it's an extraction shooter at all suggests Bungie saw the success of Tarkov and banked on the genre continuing its meteoric growth. But jump back to the present day, and although extraction shooters are an established subgenre propping up a few successful games, it's not battle royale big. Even more problematically for Bungie, large parts of the Destiny 2 fanbase—which ought to be Bungie's easiest demographic to target—are actively, vocally, hostile toward Marathon to the point of openly wanting to see it fail.
If I were Sony... we might be having a very difficult conversation about what's to be done with Marathon.
Those players' reasoning is that, over the last few years, resources and talent have been syphoned away from Destiny 2 to fund not just Marathon but multiple other incubation projects at Bungie. Discovering how much talent had been drained off has really stuck in players' craws, particularly given that Bungie had previously claimed it simply didn't have the manpower to create stuff as basic as new seasonal armor sets and PvP maps, leading to predictable uproar followed by panicked rowing back. It's that frostiness, combined with the vertiginous difficulty of launching any new live service game in such an oversaturated market, that leaves me struggling to see a scenario in which Marathon is the savior Bungie now needs.
But if there's one studio that does seem to do its best work from a stress position, it's Bungie. I love the feel of its gunplay to the tune of many thousands of hours logged in Destiny 2, and frankly I go into every new game hoping it succeeds. But if I were Sony and I was picking up the tab for what has just happened with Concord, particularly with Destiny 2 bleeding players in the aftermath of The Final Shape… Well, then we might be having a very difficult conversation about what's to be done with Marathon.
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