With just about everyone out there weighing in on the Marathon situation, I wasn’t sure if I really wanted to write anything about it myself. After all, what is there to add at this point? It’s a terrible situation that was entirely avoidable, and is likely to lose Sony an insane amount of money and cost a lot of people their jobs. Yet, after thinking about it, I realized that Marathon and everything surrounding it are a perfect example of everything I and so many others have spent the last decade complaining about when it comes to the AAA portion of the gaming industry.

For those who haven’t really been following it, Marathon is Bungie’s (the guys who make Destiny and who used to make Halo) next game. It is, in theory, connected to the series that got Bungie off the ground all the way back in the mid-to-late 90s, that series also being called Marathon. Upon first reveal, fans were quite excited for it. See, back in the day, Marathon was a DOOM-style solo FPS known for deep lore and a very intriguing setting. The reveal trailer and stills also looked very distinctive in a way that was both modern yet strangely fit the spirit of the originals…and then we found out it was going to be an extraction shooter.

I’ll try to keep this all as brief as possible so as to not get immediately lost in the weeds. Extraction shooters are entirely online games where you go in, collect loot, and try to get out (i.e. extract) before NPC enemies or other players can find and kill you. So not exactly a return to the original formula, especially since Bungie confirmed NO single-player components. Not great for anyone who wants to dig into the world or setting.

Other issues included the fact that the story hadn’t been written yet, basic features like solo-queuing and proximity voice chat would not be implemented, there would be only a handful of maps (about 4) and six characters to play as (Overwatch-style hero shooter archetypes) and the game itself looked plain and played kind of boring during the open “alpha” the company put on a couple of weeks ago. 

It’s also come out that Bungie allegedly plagiarized someone’s artwork, with some pointing out that said work looks as though it defined the game’s entire aesthetic. Combine that with more and more current and ex-employee testimonials coming out about toxic management and the decisions Bungie leadership have made over the past several years, and you get an absolute mess of a situation.

Okay, so that’s, in the most basic of nutshells, what’s going on with Bungie and Marathon. But how does that tie into what’s wrong with AAA gaming as a whole? Well, as one former Bungie employee put it, all of these terrible decisions and this resulting terrible situation are the result of greed at the top levels of the company. Every decision, allegedly, was made purely for maximizing profit (and thereby payouts for Bungie executives).

Marathon is an extraction shooter because Bungie leadership allegedly felt that it would be easy to heavily monetize it. Features are lacking because either there aren’t enough talented developers left to implement them (due to all the mass firings) or because management simply wanted to get the game out as quickly as possible and didn’t want to allow time for their implementation.

There’s (allegedly) plagiarized artwork in Marathon because either management simply didn’t care to follow the proper process to include it, or created an environment that didn’t allow for proper art style development, making shortcuts a super attractive option for overworked developers.

Or, just look at Destiny. Look at the “vaulting” (aka removal) of massive amounts of paid content, ever more complicated webs of currency, ever increasing pushing of the in-game Eververse cash shop, and the continual decline in quality of DLC and earnable gear. In all these cases fan backlash (and apparently low level staff backlash too) was immense, yet Bungie management purportedly forged on ahead anyway because of all the money it was raking in.

The same was, reportedly, true with Marathon too, with management outright ignoring the concerns of low level developers and playtesters because it was convinced of how monetizable the extraction shooter format was. Everything in pursuit of as much money as possible, regardless of the cost. And this isn’t even getting into all the other allegations of mismanagement and liberties allegedly taken by Bungie’s C-suite executives.

This isn’t just a Bungie issue. We’ve seen similar from practically all the big names in AAA, for years and years in some cases. The immense profitability of video games has hollowed out all of these companies, with actual talent fleeing them in droves and with only those who couldn’t care less about games as games occupying positions of power. Gaming has always been a business, but business was, for a long time, balanced by passion. Now though? That’s just not the case anymore, at least at the AAA level.

So then, what’s to be done? Honestly? I think this isn’t going to go away unless these companies get starved somehow. Perhaps they’ll even do it to themselves thanks to the hundreds of millions they’re collectively throwing away on these sorts of projects. Only time will tell, though, I suppose.

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What’s your take on Marathon? What about AAA gaming as a whole?

Image from the Steam page