According to a new report, Bungie’s escape shooter Lost Starship: Marathon has a development budget of more than $200 million. Although the number of players on the Steam platform has been declining since the game was launched in March this year, many signs point to Bungie not yet facing the risk of having to stop supporting the game.
In a newly publicized report, Forbes revealed that Marathon’s budget is likely to exceed $250 million. Not only that, this allegedly does not include the costs required for long-term operation and other subsequent content development after the game is launched.
Just last month, an analyst said that Marathon did not launch with the momentum that Sony and Bungie had hoped for. The analytics company Alinea Analytics also estimated that the game’s sales across all platforms reached only 1.2 million units at the time, with total revenue of approximately $55 million.
“Marathon” once set a record of 88,337 people online at the same time when it was launched on the Steam platform, but it has continued to decline since then. The recent peak of daily players is only 25,392 people. As for the player data of this game on PS5 and Xbox consoles, it has not been made public. But considering that the PC version is currently suspected of accounting for 70% of the game’s total sales, even adding data from other platforms does not seem to improve much.
Because of such unsatisfactory performance, Bungie is currently facing pressure from Sony. Bungie had faced many problems with financial performance before this. In November 2023, Sony stated that Bungie’s multiplayer game “Destiny 2” even faced a loss of US$200 million in order to meet the expected goals of sales and player participation. Even so, Bungie is still continuing to develop follow-up content for “Marathon” and is currently not worried that it will face the crisis of closure like “Star Strike” and “Highmountain Guard”.
For now, the average gamer may have to wait until Sony releases its next financial report to confirm whether they are satisfied with the commercial performance of “Lost Starship: Marathon” in the past few months. However, this game may be a bit too hard-core for many people, and there has been controversy over art plagiarism. Various problems have made it difficult for this escape-type shooting game to achieve the same phenomenal response as “ARC Raiders” unless Bungie makes major adjustments or adds new content.
Just like many other evacuation shooting games, “Marathon” has an extremely high difficulty design. As long as the player dies during the exploration process, he will lose all the equipment on his body. This includes not only the new supplies picked up on the battlefield, but also the equipment brought into the field. However, Bungie officials have also constantly emphasized that although the learning curve of “Marathon” is steep, recovering from failures will become easier as time goes by. However, the recently launched dungeon-like map “Cryo Archive” has further enhanced the hard-core experience and set up multiple entry barriers.
“Although the experience of ‘Cryo Archive’ amazes me, it seems a bit too difficult for casual players. Cryo Archive is simply crazy. It is the most detailed escape shooting map I have ever played. And the design of the gameplay loop is very unique. But the question is, is this too complicated? Too detailed? Too farmy? Can ordinary players really play it? I don’t know.” Shroud, a well-known live streamer, said
So what’s next for Bungie? Although “Marathon” is not as miserable as “Star Strike” or “Highmountain Guard” with only 2-digit players, Bungie obviously still needs to find ways to increase sales and player numbers. And just lowering the difficulty may not be enough, and may even anger players who currently love the high-difficulty experience of this game. If it is changed to free-to-play too quickly, it may also make paid players dissatisfied.
As for the basic development budget of this game of up to 250 million US dollars, well-known journalist Jason Schreier recently pointed out that due to the high labor costs in the United States and Canada, it has become common for the development budget of AAA games to exceed 200 to 300 million US dollars. For example, “Star Attack”, which was discontinued a week after its launch, had a budget of more than 200 million yuan, and 3A stand-alone masterpieces such as “The Last of Us 2” and “Horizon: Forbidden West” also exceeded this budget price tag.
Source: KOCPC Chinese