About a month ago, Bungie’s latest big video game, Marathon, launched on consoles and PC to positive reviews and a lot of online discourse. Over the last 30+ days, Marathon has been the target of conspiracy theories and the center of a massive community-solved ARG. Most importantly, it’s been a damn fine game that has evolved quite a bit in just a month. The race to unlock Marathon’s endgame level was exciting, making it easy to forget about low player numbers and crappy cosmetics. Yet for all it’s doing right, its future remains uncertain. Will Sony support it long enough for it to grow into something that lasts, or will it die in a few months, like so many other live-service games?
Needless to say, Marathon‘s first month has been a wild, messy, fun, and strange rollercoaster. Here’s everything that’s happened from right before launch until today.
Even before Marathon launched, it was falling behind Arc Raiders
A few days before Marathon‘s launch on March 5, Alinea Insight estimated that it had sold only about 200,000 copies on Steam, which is less than half what Arc Raiders had sold just prior to its own launch. This data kicked off a wave of fans worrying about the game’s future and comparing it to other extraction shooters, like Arc Raiders. This fear around the game’s numbers would continue throughout launch and hasn’t really stopped, a little over a month later.
But hey, it wasn’t all bad news in the days leading up to Marathon’s big March 5 release! Bungie studio UI designer Elliot Gray made it clear that, despite some viral complaints about Marathon’s supposed overuse of different fonts, the “fontslop” wasn’t going away.
Bungie promises to fight back against dataminers
On launch day, Bungie had a message to share with anyone poking into the files of Marathon for spoilers on future updates: Don’t. More specifically, the studio warned that it would go after online content sharing, datamined assets, or code ahead of its public reveal. This was previously a big problem with Bungie’s other live-service game, Destiny 2.
“With today’s launch of Marathon, we just wanted to give you all a heads-up that our goal is first and foremost to preserve the experience and surprises for all of our players,” the studio posted on Twitter via the official Marathon account on March 5. “As such, we will be issuing takedowns for any datamined content that has not yet been revealed to players.”
Marathon’s $15 cosmetic packs and crappy battle pass
While many players hopped into Marathon‘s extraction action on day one, some players instead explored the shooter’s in-game store and discovered some very pricey cosmetic packs and skins. $12 for a single cosmetic skin isn’t unheard of in the world of video games, but in a $40 video game, it felt rough.
Making matters worse, Bungie was selling Lux, Marathon‘s premium currency, in packs deliberately designed to force you to spend more to get the Lux you needed for a single skin. Again, a common tactic in games, especially free-to-play games, but it felt out of place in Marathon. Thankfully, on March 7, Bungie fixed the issue, and $10 Lux packs got a small buff, letting players buy a skin with the included currency without needing to spend a bit more. Bungie also promised to improve the game’s awful battle pass.
Some Marathon players smuggled beta weapons into the full game
Before Marathon’s March 5 launch, Bungie held a short server slam beta test. None of the experience or weapons earned in this test were intended to carry over into the full release. But players who dropped a weapon or item for someone else to borrow during a server slam match discovered a surprise waiting for them in their inbox. Borrowed items are returned to players if you extract successfully, making it hard to sell or trade gear. But those players who never grabbed their returned items in the beta arrived in Marathon with some potentially very good gear waiting for them on day one.
Marathon is good!
In the days after Marathon’s launch, Kotaku’s own Ethan Gach and I played a lot of it. And while we had some quibbles about quests, ammo shortages, and vault space, one thing we both agreed on was that Marathon kicked ass. It quickly dominated my nights. I joined a Discord group with other journos playing Marathon so we could chat about the game and play together. I thought about the game as I worked. It had become our next big multiplayer experience.
But Marathon fans can’t stop doomposting about its SteamDB player numbers
Despite Marathon being a very good video game, a lot of Marathon fans were seemingly unable to stop spiraling over Marathon’s “low” player count on SteamDB. Posts like this dominated the game’s subreddit and were everywhere on social media. This led to the mods of the Marathon subreddit deleting many of these posts, leading to more posts and discourse. It was a giant mess. It got so bad that a Finals player showed up to try to calm down anxious fans, saying, “Y’all got to let the numbers talk go.”
Some devs even pushed back against all the SteamDB chart-watching, with one Overwatch dev labeling it “unemployed, maidenless behaviour.” Another dev is suggesting naming a future Warframe update “Player Count” to screw with Google searches and slow the discourse.
Bungie starts up an in-game event featuring Durandal
Less than 48 hours after Marathon launched, Bungie quietly activated hidden terminals inside the game’s different maps. Interacting with these terminals triggered dialogue from a character fans believe to be Durandal, a rogue AI that first appeared in the original Marathon games from the ’90s. This was the start of a larger puzzle and ARG-like experience that would require players to work together to kill a lot of bots, activate a ton of terminals, and solve some cryptic problems to eventually unlock Marathon’s final, endgame map: Cyro Archive.
👀 Durandal #Marathon
Credit: __meh pic.twitter.com/2BXVaTHiec
— Marathon Codec (@MarathonCodec) March 6, 2026
In the meantime, they also created drone warfare
While some of the Marathon community were racing to solve Bungie’s big puzzle and unlock the endgame level, other players realized they could stick claymore explosives to a Thief drone and, in the process, brought drone warfare to the game. Fun stuff.
Marathon’s first big post-launch update is really good
Following some tiny hotfixes, Marathon received its first real, substantial post-launch update on March 11. And on paper, it seemed like a perfect update. Objective markers for quest locations would show up sooner, ammo would be a bit less hard to find, UESC drone soldiers would be a bit easier to kill, and Rook runs would become easier thanks to the map being fixed to actually show the playable robot’s position. These were all great, community-requested changes. However, one tweak mentioned in the patch notes talked about increasing how loud gunshots were and how far away players could hear them in maps. Hmmm…
Making gunshots louder threw the game into chaos
In the 24 hours after the patch went live, players online, including myself, noted that Marathon felt entirely different. It felt more chaotic, dangerous, and deadlier. Players blamed this on the louder gunshots, which made the maps in Marathon feel very small, as a single gunshot now could alert nearly every player to your location. Many complained that this changed Marathon‘s vibes, and it now felt like an arena shooter instead of a slower-paced extraction game.
In response to the online complaints, Marathon audio director Chase Combs posted on Twitter: “Feedback heard, loud and clear. (Get it?)” with a gif of Holt from Brooklyn 99 exclaiming, “Fine, I was trying something, and it didn’t work!” This got people excited that the change to gunshots would be reverted. And that change happened about a week later, on March 17, as part of a larger update that nerfed a shotgun and added Cryo Archive to the game.
Bungie also hit back at folks claiming the studio was no longer made up of Halo vets
As Marathon players were yelling about updates, puzzles, player count, and quality, a somewhat popular YouTuber decided to add some new discourse to the menu and argued that there was likely nobody at modern Bungie who had worked on Halo. In response to this, many people, including the fontslop merchant himself, Elliot Gray, pointed out that, actually there were a bunch of Halo vets still working at the studio.
Marathon finally starts testing out duos
When it launched in early March, Bungie’s extraction shooter only supported solo and trios matchmaking. A lot of people were confused about this and asked for a duos option. On March 18, Bungie added what it labeled an “experimental” duos mode to Marathon. According to the studio, this wasn’t going to be a perfect, polished experience, but they wanted to start working on it and get feedback as soon as possible. While Bungie has yet to confirm if duos matchmaking will stick around, it has continued to test the mode in Marathon since March 18.
And after the community’s hard work, Bungie unlocks Cyro Archive, Marathon‘s wicked endgame level
On March 19, fans finally solved Bungie’s ARG and puzzles and unlocked Cryo Archive, the game’s endgame map. Cyro Archive, unlike the other areas in Marathon, is a limited-time map only available on the weekend. On top of that, players need to have decent loot to enter and have to complete all of the faction intro quests found in Marathon, including a very annoying one. It’s not easy getting into Cryo Archive, and it’s even more brutal once you get there.
Cryo Archive is free from Rooks, bars access to solo players, and doesn’t allow sponsored kits to join in on the fun. If you want to play Cryo Archive, you have to bring good gear and risk it all each time you join. The high bar for entry is a shame, because it means a lot of players won’t get to experience this incredible map that is filled with so many details, corridors, secrets, and rare loot. The first time I extracted from Cryo Archive, I was giddy and stood up to do a little dance. I half-expected the credits to roll on Marathon at that moment.
Meanwhile, some folks are so desperate to hate Marathon that they buy into a false conspiracy
As with any modern video game, Marathon had a contingent of angry people online who like to yell about it all the time. And many of these content creators and posters fell for a silly conspiracy a few weeks after Bungie’s FPS launched. A post on Reddit claimed that it showed a screenshot of a Discord server setup by Bungie and Sony to pay people to write positive reviews and posts online. Scandalous!
But, as pointed out here by Lewis Parker, this was all bullshit. Someone had simply used a real Discord server and used Chrome’s “Inspect Element” tool to tweak some basic HTML code on their end to make it seem like the Discord server was actually part of some nefarious plot to pay for good coverage. Nope! Just chuds and trolls flailing at something they don’t like as they try to squeeze any engagement they can out of the angry people.
After playing for a few weeks, Kotaku’s review of Marathon arrives
Finally, on March 27, I sat down and published a review after playing around 50+ hours of Marathon to review Bungie’s big extraction shooter. You can read my full thoughts here, but the short version is that while it has some rough edges and might not live to see a season two, I don’t care. What’s here is a fantastic FPS that has given me so many awesome moments and stories that will outlive servers and hype cycles. As I said at the end of that review: The future might be bleak, but Marathon fucking rules.
