Because the video game studio Bungie has built some of this century’s most influential franchises, the science-fiction shooters Halo and Destiny, expectations are high for its first new property since 2014.
The financial stakes may be even higher.
Since Sony acquired Bungie in 2022 for $3.6 billion, with the promise of valuable blockbusters, the studio has delayed several expansions and games, imposed layoffs, lost a chief executive and even been called out in a shareholder call for not meeting sales expectations. And after several missteps by Sony’s other studios, it desperately wants a hit live service game, one like Fortnite, where an addicting gameplay loop and regular updates keep people logging on for years.
Perhaps that is why Marathon, the cyberpunk extraction shooter that Bungie released on Thursday, has adopted a different tone than the studio’s other games. While Halo and Destiny revolve around galaxy-saving, humanity-redeeming heroes, Marathon has a tense, precarious setting where survival is always in doubt.
At Bungie’s headquarters in Bellevue, Wash., last month, a video montage of Marathon showed mechanized soldiers ducking and sliding between plasticky architecture and tank-like machines, each strewed with neon-colored stickers and all-caps warnings. The atonal, industrial songs had titles like “Rhythm of Writhing Constellations” and “We Shouldn’t Be Here.” After laying down rounds of machine-gun laser fire, one soldier clinched victory by mounting another and delivering a coup de grâce via a knife to the chest.
“Every violent lesson so painfully learned,” a voice uttered after the fight. “Such suffering. Such ambition for glory in the face of unknowable terror.”
This is the hook of the extraction shooter, an online multiplayer genre where the best resources are limited and, at any moment, another player might kill you and steal whatever bounty is in your backpack. Alternatively, you might do the same and escape with high-value loot.
The concept might sound grim, but there is real appeal. The hard-core computer game Escape From Tarkov has built a cult following over the past decade, and last year’s release of Arc Raiders, a friendlier spin, introduced the genre to many console players. (Like Arc Raiders, Marathon is available on the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and PC.)
Stephen Totilo, the former editor in chief of the gaming site Kotaku and the founder of the Game File newsletter, explained that extraction shooters “offer the thrill of taking bigger chances for bigger rewards — like gambling, asking the best-looking person at the bar out on a date or lobbying your boss for the biggest possible raise.”
During a closed alpha test of Marathon last year, Bungie worried that players would be turned off by the difficulty of staying alive, said its game director, Joe Ziegler. Player feedback, though, revealed the opposite.
“Players wanted us to lean harder into survival aspects,” Ziegler said, “to make it more challenging and interesting to survive on the planet, even if that meant death was inevitably part of the experience.”
Longtime Bungie fans are familiar with the name Marathon: The new game borrows its lore from a 1990s first-person shooter of the same name, in which humanity has sent thousands of people to a faraway planet.
This year’s Marathon reboot is much drearier. More than 100 years after the original trilogy’s events, many interstellar citizens have disappeared. But instead of controlling heroes who save the day, like in Halo and Destiny, players become dystopian mercenaries who pick at the scraps on space colonies. They transfer their consciousness to mechanized, bipedal “shells” to scour a planet’s resources, pick up artifacts, weapons and ammunition, and contend with other “runners” who are doing the same.
“Typically, runner-to-runner encounters are expected to be violent,” notes Marathon’s in-game glossary.
With the exception of the online shooter Helldivers 2, released in February 2024, Sony has struggled to create a live service game. The team-based hero shooter Concord had such a dreadful reception in August 2024 that Sony issued refunds and shut down the game two weeks after its release. Multiplayer entries in the popular God of War and The Last of Us series were canceled during development.
Sony declined to comment about its live service portfolio. Ziegler said Bungie did not want to set in stone its plans for Marathon beyond this year at the cost of flexibility.
“We want to make sure we can create mysteries and surprises,” he said.
In 2023, a year after Sony acquired Bungie, the studio revealed Marathon in a teaser video that looked quite different from the starry-eyed Destiny: eerie, stylish, cyberpunk.
Tumult soon followed.
The game’s first creative director, Christopher Barrett, left the company in early 2024 and filed a wrongful termination lawsuit against Sony that seeks damages of at least $200 million. (When Bloomberg reported that Barrett was fired after an internal investigation into allegations of sexual misconduct, he said he had “never understood my communications to be unwanted.”)
Later that year, Bungie laid off 220 employees, or 17 percent of its work force. Pete Parsons, then Bungie’s chief executive, wrote on its website that after rapid expansion “our financial safety margins were subsequently exceeded.” Roughly one year later, he stepped down.
The challenges continued when Marathon, which had been scheduled to be released in September 2025, was delayed after negative feedback to its alpha test. Those who had played complained about online battlegrounds with limited challenges, little to do and unengaging environments to explore.
One rival seized the opportunity: Embark Studios, which was created by former Electronic Arts developers who worked on the Battlefield series, has sold at least 14 million copies of Arc Raiders since October. That game’s unexpected level of success, though, could ultimately help Marathon.
“Arc Raiders reminded people that there’s room for new games in this subgenre,” Totilo said.
Arc Raiders has set itself apart as a surprisingly friendly version of an extraction shooter, where players can ask others not to shoot and form temporary truces to help one another survive. Bungie has opted not to lean into impromptu online friendliness, with Marathon rewarding merciless play.
At a daylong presentation last month, a countertop in Bungie’s cafeteria was littered with company-themed Valentine’s Day cards. “This fireteam couldn’t do it without you!” referred to Destiny. “Our kit wouldn’t be complete without you as our core!” included Marathon parlance. The rest of the day was less sweet-sounding, thanks to Marathon’s dark tone and the employees’ trash talk during gameplay sessions.
Ziegler said Bungie had a tandem goal of creating a “social story of survival.” Adjustments to Marathon’s voice chat, solo mode and mechanics since the game’s delay did not make it easier, he emphasized. Instead, they gave players more opportunities to die, laugh and try again.
Certain gameplay abilities — like shields or proximity sensors — that were originally locked behind certain shell types can now be discovered as loot. The studio has also invented clever systems, like a disposable shell with unique solo-play abilities, that allow more anxious players to dip a toe into the water, risking less when dropping into Marathon’s wastelands.
Julia Nardin, Marathon’s creative director, said a big part of the game was piecing together what happened to the missing population by completing contracts and collecting items. “While it’s true that those individuals are long gone — or at least they appear to be — their dreams persist,” she said.
The streamer known as KingRichard, an expert in extraction shooters, had mixed first impressions during a recent demo period for Marathon. “There’s no way this game can steal Arc Raiders’s player base,” he said early on, describing the game’s movement as outdated. After more time playing, though, he championed how Marathon’s different classes offer fun ways to move around after all. “This game is awesome,” he said twice.
During my time in the demo, I took advantage of systems designed to let novice players die with less risk. I needed eight failed sessions in a row before something clicked. Bungie has applied its signature polish to a brutal genre.
My friends and I skulked silently through Marathon’s cyberpunk environs, defeated a few human players, held back robotic foes and then barely hung on for the final exfiltration phase. We had been shot by a surprising wave of enemies but still crawled into the escape pod just in time, our loot-filled backpacks intact and shiny trails of blue blood left behind.
Bungie may feel the same as my dilapidated squad, pulling itself over the line to get a lucrative game like Marathon out the door.
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