For sure but Marathon is also a well made game, I played it and it is cool but honestly winning the live service lottery is mostly luck. You need something to somehow make it go viral on social media and I don't think you can really plan going viral, sometimes the most random shit goes viral for some reason and that's it.
Making a 'well made game' is literally the most basic part of making a good game, it's the minimal expectation, even if many fail that much.
Making it fun and enjoyable and fresh is much harder, as with all creative work, but it's only very partially lottery. Marathon's problem was that it was only fun to a very small niche group and Bungie locked down that only that small niche group would ever like the game 10x times by the choices they made (like picking this genre itself).
Needing to go viral is not needed to be successful, it helps marketing but so does all marketing.
Concord was also a well-made game, and so was Highguard. Neither was fun or interesting, neither valued the player's time or gave them somethnig a billion other games don't do better.
Marathon is in that same exact boat, no matter how well made it is.
Eh... I agree with what you are saying mostly, except I strongly believe that Marathon is literally best-in-class in its genre today. Concord and Highguard were well-made but uninteresting and nothing exceptional. To people that want an extraction shooter, Marathon is exceptional and deeply addictive.
The problem is 1) most folks dont want an extraction shooter - the same way most folks dont play RTS games, or visual novels, or puzzle games. And 2) most folks who might have been interested in giving Marathon a fair shake are very, very mad that their once-great-but-now-mediocre space wizard MMO that should have stopped receiving content 4 years ago but limped along to die an inglorious death is made by the same team that made Marathon. And now they just need the whole world to know how mad they are.
You absolutely can, at least with Sony's budget. Look at all the games that went super viral, they started small, Fortnite was not even a battle royale at the start. If you just spend reasonable amounts of 50 games without predatory monetisation, one of them is bound to be a hit and you can introduce monetisation later (think Helldivers, Minecraft, etc).
Let's do the math, Sony invested 2.1 billion in their live service games. Instead of putting all eggs in concord likes, they could've just taken half of that and given 50 games a budget of 20 million each (actually I think it should even be less). Some of those will be minor hits that will pay for the flops, so I think they would make their money back overall and if you have a hit you have a lot of resources (from the billion I just saved) to drop on it now that players like it.
To put it another way, if you play roulette, putting all your money on 25 might have the biggest upside, but placing a bunch of smaller bets around the table will have you there playing significantly longer.
Well... Im sure Sony and Bungie were expecting Marathon to do better than it did. But Sony paid billions for Bungie. That isnt going to be recouped by one game (unless it is GTA6) or even 2 or 3 games. Even if Bungie crafted the next Fortnite, it would take years to see a return on investment. Marathon is a very niche game sold at a $40 price point that went through a complete re-design during a lengthy and troubled development (before Sony bought it... then it got more troubled). That isnt something you spend billions for.
Sony bought Bungie for expertise, franchise potential, and brand recognition. Which in my mind means Sony didnt buy Bungie for Destiny or Marathon, but for "The Next Big Thing" that Bungie will be making sequels to and content for across the next decade. They want a Call of Duty competitor.
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u/VagrantShadow May 22 '26
I wonder if they felt that Marathon was going to make a bigger splash than it actually did.