Marathon development is reportedly facing trouble at Bungie: “There’s a reason that it was planned for this year and slipped a whole year”

Marathon, the Bungie-developed extraction shooter, is reportedly facing production struggles, with some devs not confident the game will make its internally planned release target in 2025.

During a recent appearance on the Friends Per Second podcast (timestamped at 31:28), Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier was asked how development of Marathon was going. “Not great, from what I’ve heard,” Schreier responded. “There’s a reason that it was planned for this year and slipped a whole year. People that I’ve talked to are a little pessimistic about it even hitting its current planned deadline, but we’ll see. I don’t know exactly when that is – sometime in 2025, I’m not sure. Yeah, I mean, the sentiment I’ve heard is not great around it. At least as of a few months ago.” 

‘A few months ago’ would put this temperature check somewhere before the recent layoffs of over 220 people at Bungie, but well after the 2023 layoffs. Marathon has never had a publicly announced release window, but while breaking news of last year’s layoffs, Schreier reported that Destiny 2: The Final Shape had been delayed to June 2024 and Marathon had its internal release target shift from 2024 to 2025. That Final Shape delay was, of course, proven real in the end.

Marathon is a revival of the decades-old Bungie FPS series that paved the way for Halo – but instead of a narrative-driven Doom-like, it’s now a PvP extraction shooter. We’ve seen far too little of the game to make any real judgments about it, but the gaming community’s collective live service fatigue means it’s going to have an uphill battle convincing players to give it a fair shot even if it can escape the internal struggles at Bungie.

Bungie’s Marathon looks the part, but do we really need another extraction shooter?