Bungie won’t say how much Marathon will cost, but it will be a ‘premium title’

The price of the game will be announced this Summer
Bungie is probably waiting to see if Nintendo is able to get away with $80 for "premium" titles.
- And it'll have all the microtransaction features executives have come to expect. Overpriced battlepass, loot boxes, overpriced fomo cosmetic store.
- Marathon will be a premium title. Marahton will not be a ‘full-priced’ title.”
- I mean, Nintendo already got away with it. People are pissed, but you already have people saying theyre gona buy it anyway.

Shows up 10 years late to the Battle Royale trend
”Hey kids check out our cool generic extraction shooter with a battle pass”
2 weeks after release, only 900 active players remain
Cancel season pass and layoff half the company.
Can’t wait!
- lol yeah, is this going to be Concord all over again?
  
  I gotta say, first time I heard of Concord, was two days after release. The headline which introduced me to Concord was "Concord only has X active players". At least I'm hearing about Marathon before it comes out.
  
  No. Marathon has strong marketing.
- Off topic but I genuinely can't understand why people like to throw battle royales and extraction shooters into the same pot. The fact that battle royales have been immensely successful (PUBG, Fortnite, Apex) while the only extraction shooter with relative success is Escape From Tarkov (I won't get into the details but pretty much everyone hates to play) should be indication that any similarities between the two genres are entirely superficial.
  They cater to very different audiences.
  
  It's wild indeed. The worst part about this comparison is that people say it'll fail because of the competition, but there's literally 0 competition in the genre from big studios. The only three somewhat successful games are Delta Force, Hunt Showdown and Escape from Tarkov, two of those are premium games, one where people are willing to pay 250$ for it. It's even a genre where people mostly want it to be paid to reduce cheating.
  
  To a layman like me the gameplay looks the same. Groups of 2-3 people exploring a large map for resources. Encountering other groups and looting on the way. Extraction shooter to me just means more money on micro-transactions like bank slots.
- Don't forget that they spent 150 million on getting Alberto Mielgo to make a cool cinematic trailer for the game.

Lmao premium? My ass. That doesnt mean anything. BG3 was "premium" because of the soul put into it. Is this game anywhere near that? Does it at least tell me I'm pretty for the "premium" price?
- I've spent more time in minecraft and terraria (and skylim, released in 2011, which I last played in 2023) than I have in any other games, and those aren't exactly what I'd call "premium". I'd agree that more than money needs to be poured into a game to make it good.
  
  I'm just glad the minecraft launcher doesn't track time playing. knowing I probably have over a year of playtime is different then actually seeing it.
- Does it at least tell me I'm pretty for the "premium" price?
  Probably only available for the digital deluxe ultimate limited edition.
  Which will also be available a month later as a twenty dollar microtransaction.
  
  40 dollar* they're just adding twenty to everything.
  Cassette Beasts just had a free update BTW.
  Indie is the way to go moving forward.
- I think 'premium' in this case is synonymous with 'not free to play'.
  
  'premium' and not 'full price' can mean anything between .01 USD and 79.98 USD at this point when you've got a major console and publisher reporting bullshit 80 dollar price points.
  You give these corporate jackasses a inch and they'll bend you over and I for one don't trust any of these AAA publishers.
  My guess is they're looking at Nintendo here and seeing if they push 50 - 55 USD a 'premium', executive bullshit buzzword on par work AAAA gaming, over what is considered normal, 40 USD, now for a live service game.
  
  That would make sense but the descriptor is still not a good one. Admittedly it might be my ancient perspective.

yeah this is a lil fucked up way to even try to announce pricing, or avoid announcing it in this matter
- Premium in this context means it'll cost money. Not full priced means it won't be £70.
- I don't even understand what they mean....
  
  I don’t even understand what they mean…
  Something on the line "We wish we could charge you the 80$, AAA, price; hoverer, we didn't implemented decent AI bot for you to play with/against... so we need players themselves to do the job"
  TL;DR: 20€/$

Multiply whatever it ends up costing by the number of copies I'll be paying for, and you get... hmmm. Is that right? It keeps coming up zero. Must be this new A1-powered calculator.

The last time I bought a game for $40 was in 2014, the last time I paid $60 was in 2011 (and it was a mistake).
While there will always be an endless surge of people willing to pay whatever price game companies demand and those people can't be convinced to care enough to change, if you're reading this I hope you're the kind of person who can look into the effectively infinite backlog of games that already exist and into the indie and AA space for new games at decent prices done with some actual passion.

So... is there any relation to the Marathon that came out in 1994 by Bungie?
Because... the art style genuinely looks awesome but I don't see anything that reminds me of the original. Not in enemies, or gameplay, or plot, it also seems entirely online multi-player, I see no rogue AI.
Honestly I would be intrigued by the art style alone but... the shameless name grab makes me think it's gonna flop.
- I've seen a few of the famous quotes, but the Marathon itself is too spherical to be the old flying Space Spud. Bungie has often referred back to Old Marathon but this feels off. It's like someone is doing this only reading Wikiquote and a few summaries. I did see hints of Tau Ceti's spaceport being nuked, and the involvement of MIDA as a contractor, so there's a few hints of the deep lore.
  They're cagey about the story as well, suggesting they don't have a written one yet. I'll bet they were starting towards a proper story and an author keen on the original Marathon left with the pieces sat idle in the meantime as the game grew.
  It also feels incomplete, lots of pve features despite pvp extraction as the stated goal. I think this was intended to have multiple game modes, several factions trying to find something left behind, Tycho making a move on the ruins controlled by fragments of Leela. Throw in a bonus UESC force Sent by a hint from Durandal who is still off having his own brand of fun elsewhere. Perhaps Straus's plans with the Colony long term come up.
  A dream perhaps. On an Idea for a new Aleph One Scenario.
  
  Maybe they fed some Marathon assets into Claude and asked it to build a generic cooperative loot shooter, or whatever they think is cool this year.
- It's almost certainly not going to have much connection to the Marathon series beyond the name and general thematic direction.
  I would love to be priced wrong.
- Such a shame. I do think Halo was very much already the spiritual successor to Marathon, and I know all the studios just want to have the big multiplayer game that everyone plays for years and years these days, but man was I excited when I first saw the teaser for this last year. I still name all my computer equipment after Marathon AIs.

Triple Quadruple Quintuple A Pricing

I could play single-player games like Witcher 3 over and over for the next 5 years and not miss a single thing put out by EA, Bethesda, etc. We've got other stuff to do.
- I am playing Stardew Valley and there is so much to do in the game that I'm set for this year.

500 players max at launch. Downhill from there

What a manipulative headline. By premium, they mean it won't be free to play, and leaving the fact that they also said it won't be full priced out of the headline makes it clickbait. Fuck that awful website.

Anything with the word "premium" attached to it goes on my ignore list.
There are so many games out there these days that I really don't feel pressure to buy any single title.
- yes, I too expect all games to be free