While the deck has always been stacked against Bungie Marathon, trying to make an impact in the less-than-mainstream extraction shooter market with a hero-based concept somewhat antithetical to the genre, Arc Raiders has just made things a lot more difficult.
We talked about this a while ago with Arc Raiders’ alpha landed in the middle of Marathon’s alpha, and conversation shifted quickly into how good Arc was and how much work Marathon still needed, despite the fact Marathon was supposed to come out first.
Now, the open beta “server slam” test of Arc Raiders has put up stunning numbers, a 190,000 peak concurrent total on Steam. Even with a $40 price point at the end of the road, the game has already moved to be the #3 best-selling game on Steam after how good of impression this test made, and looks like it will have a huge launch for the relatively small studio, Embark.
If Arc Raiders turns out to be a big success when it launches in less than two weeks, as it seems almost guaranteed it will be, that spells big trouble for Marathon. Not just because it’s a great game in a genre it’s trying to break into, but because it is now coming out before Marathon, when previously that was not supposed to be the case.
The original plan for Marathon was going to be its own open beta in August ahead of its launch on September 23, over a month before Arc Raiders. That would have allowed a number of purchases without Arc being live, tests aside.
Now, however, Marathon is going to find itself in a situation where if it does make it out in Q4 of this fiscal year before March 31, 2026, as Sony claims, that is now going to be 3-5 months after Arc Raiders already got potentially millions of people to purchase the game and invest time into gearing up and moving toward higher stages of the shooter. Then, Marathon comes along and is asking people for another $40. Previously, the challenge for Marathon was to both find new genre players or pull them from staples like Tarkov. Now, Arc Raiders, which has gotten new players and pulled them from other shooters, will be established and it’s another thing Marathon is going to have to siphon from, one that is new and shiny. Woof.
This weekend, the Arc Raiders design director actually brought up Marathon when talking to PC Gamer about the overlapping alphas:
“It was very coincidental that they had their test around the time we did. To my knowledge, I don’t think any of us knew that was going to happen,” Watkins said. “It was a very great A/B test for us, because obviously they made decisions that we didn’t, and vice versa. So we could kind of compare and contrast how some of those things shook out.”
I don’t take that as a dig at Marathon, as the two are very different with Marathon having a hero-based model, while Arc Raiders uses more traditional, classless custom characters. Arc Raiders is third-person while Marathon is a traditional Bungie FPS. Though both are extraction games with perma-lost loot and PvE components, of course. Arc Raiders has also not been marred by a plagiarism scandal like Marathon was shortly after that alpha.
I have been consistent in saying I simply do not think Marathon is going to work, but Arc Raiders selling a few million copies just months before Marathon is going to try to do the same thing, in the exact same genre, with a game with fewer good vibes, that may be close to impossible.
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