You Might Not Want to Know How Much It Reportedly Cost Bungie to Make Marathon

Only 20k players right now and 25k for the 24hour peak. Ouch that hurts!!!

Sony need to take FULL control of Bungie and get them in line.
This is ridiculous to be honest.

@Zeke68 *needs

Unfortunately, not that surprising. I hope Sony and Bungie are committed to the long haul because the game is actually excellent and, if done correctly, can grow an audience over time. But the cost for such a hardcore, niche game is pretty crazy.

I still can't believe how SM2 cost 300 million. I couldn't tell they spent triple the first Spider-Man. What a dissapointing game that was.

@Zeke68 Should have made this game a single player epic like Halo, but in the marathon universe. Would have helped sales. Not everyone likes extraction shooters, most can get behind epic single player games regardless. The graphics and art style are amazing, gameplay too. The whole mechanics, wasted time and premise that's the heart and soul of extraction shooters is trash

@Balaam_ Grammarnazi spotted alert alert

/jk You are right needS

@Balaam_ @Zeke68 You're both correct. Isn't English fun???

Well, Bungie has over 800 people (with over 300 of those having worked on Marathon), in one of the most expensive cities in the world today (where game developer salaries can easily exceed $250,000 annually). Yeah, it makes sense.

And I really can't see any alternative other than big publishers stopping to invest in studios in places like California, Washington and Canada.

Marathon wouldn't have cost less if it "were smaller", as the game was known for having little content at launch. Bungie going back to making single-player games also won't make the games cheaper to make (and it would be a failure for Sony since Bungie was specifically bought for its multiplayer games)

And please, it's time to stop regretting the cancellation of TLOU Online. Folks need to understand that if that game had gone ahead, we would hardly see a new single-player game from Naughty Dog anytime soon.

@wildcat_kickz Nah, I mean they need to choose a Studio "manager" that makes things more effective.

@Zeke68 Fair enough. I think they're probably there since the last CEO left a few months ago, but Marathon was way too deep to do anything about the budget by then.

@wildcat_kickz What?! I was right?!, well thank you englishteacher (she was hot)

@wildcat_kickz True, might get better from now on.

Now combine that with Tassi's other report that the game sold about 1.2 million copies and multiply that by 40 dollars. Except, Steam takes a cut between 30 and 20% from each copy and that's reportedly the game's biggest platform, so profits from base sales are significantly less than $48M.

Then factor in ongoing costs for servers as well as every employee still getting paid to keep the game going and boy oh boy, better hope those microtransactions are selling like hotcakes because this looks like a mighty flop.

@StitchJones I would have bought it as a singleplayer if they had choosen another graphical style. for me it looks like those early 3D cartoon programs made for kids late 90's, early 2000 so that's not my thnig at all. But if anyone likes it, I wont complain. Just not my thing.

Just releasing The Last of Us Online and not buying Bungie would have been cheaper. 🤷‍♂️

@wildcat_kickz I agree the game is very good and the gunplay is super tight but the overall cost is staggering.

@Balaam_ Are you from the US? There always seems to be a difference between the way that British people and American people use language around an organisation.

For example, I would say that that "Manchester United have made a huge summer signing and will now win the league"

Whereas, an American would probably say "Manchester United has made a huge summer signing and will now win the league".

The British version normally refers to an organisation/company/team as a collective rather than a single entity.

Agreed? @get2sammyb

Of course, the difference between Spiderman 2 and Marathon is that the former went over 10MM copies sold, but the latter is only in the 1MM copies range…

$3.5B just to publish it LOL

Did anybody here expect a lower budget?

Meanwhile, the Steam player count is declining constantly week by week. What a shame.

And no, I didn’t buy it, it’s not my genre.

@Max_the_German I love the game, but even I'll admit, that trend line isn't great to see.

If it has single player I would maybe bite over that EGA palette graphics.

Any suggestion for good singleplayer FPS sci-fi shooter? Haven't played something solid since Unreal 2.

@Scottyy the cost of the license and other things were to factor into the cost.

Make it free to play and hope bungie can turn things around. Making a hardcore extraction shooter and spending that sort of money on it is insane!! The first wipe will tank player numbers even further, I just can’t see Sony allowing them to keep a large team making content for this one considering it will never make back the development costs.

Well they best hope they sell 6 million copies then otherwise Sony's coming in hot to take full control.

I played solo on pc, no autofill and quit after 20 hours. Every quest that goes "in one run" are practically impossible. Also the "story" missions are gated behind faction levels. So you do the same generic contracts over and over to level the faction up. Faction progres up to level 10 is fairly quick but as soon as you hit 10 that progress falls.off a cliff and comes to a near complete halt. I imagine if one enjoys grinding then this game will make them happy. Just know that solo you can't to the wndgame map. So yeah......like I said at the beginning I quit and I'm not going back.

@Scottyy "I still can't believe how SM2 cost 300"

They already had the engine and they reused allot of assets from the previous games so how did it get that high? My guess would be marketing as you couldn't escape the advertisings!

It's frustrating that a lot of us are paying for irresponsible spending on live service failures through ongoing price hike to make up for games we never asked for. The worst part is that if one of these whale hunting cynical GaaS stabs in the dark actually hits it will only decrease the need to put effort into making actual quality games and experiences. It's pretty awful really. It either ends up with Sony destroying themselves or a live service game taking over completely.

i’m jaded to the prices they splurge on mid games at the behest of $ony, when i can’t & never will touch a piece of it . all that fiat being wasted , i guess the dollar really doesn’t have any value 💀

Sounds an awful lot like a Sony problem rather than a me problem.

$250 Million along with the ongoing costs is gonna cause heads to roll with the numbers its doing. At this point you just have to hope that they let Bungie attempt a Destiny 3.

Almost insane to say but Sony is easily better off sinking $300 Million in to a Spidey, Last of Us, God of War, etc and can almost guarantee it will turn a profit (along with the consoles they sell) over whatever Marathon is incinerating right now.

I'm sorry. What in the holy hell are they spending the money on? I'm starting to think most of these studios are just dragging their feet on purpose. Hire some drill sergeant producers to get these people in line.

I have almost 200 hours. This game is a top 10 for me. It's amazing. At the same time, it is a game that is built to weed out a vast majority of gamers. It's not an economically ideal game, it's just superb at being its tiny niche

Management blunder, loose a quarter billion, honest employees get sacked. The world is run by vault Tec dweebs.

Concord and now Marathon. How much money has Sony lost making games that no one asked for or wanted this gen. And haven't even got to fairgames and horizon yet. Worst gen ever