The quote "
there is a strong push to get Marathon out the door before then (Summer 2026), and let whoever takes the reins after that (be it Sony or Bungie) worry about how it's sustained." is total bullshit, eiher fake or someone who has no fucking idea what they are talking about. First, SIE owns Bungie, period.
Second, there is a 0% of chances that anyone at Sony or Bungie considering that Marathon could be released in Summer 2026 or beyond. At least until a couple years ago they planned to release Marathon in 2024, "before 2025". The rumor of the game getting delayed is very likely, since games get delayed all the time.
Considering AAA dev teams normally leave around year for testing, polishing and tweaks, means they delayed it in the last year of proper development, so changes shouldn't be something huge. Add some extra months, like half a year or a year more. But that's all, I'd bet pretty likely will release H1 2025, maximum H2 2025 if want to add extra polish.
Regarding the quote: "
Matter was canceled back in 2020, but the team continued working on a similar project with slightly different direction until that too was canceled in late 2022." I'd say it's also total bullshit because
in 2023 they renewed the Matter trademark, which they registered originally 5 years before, in 2018.
On top of that, since acquired in 2022 Bungie until now grew from 900 employees to over 1500-1600, and I highly doubt it's to have them working on Destiny 2, Marathon and a project in early stages that they aren't very sure about it. The lead studio of a game may have around 200 people, let's say 300 to be generous in a game when it's in full production.
They have enough people to have more than 5 big AAA games under full production (not prototypes in early stages). After having fired 100 people a few months ago, the studio won't hire like 400 or 500 people more just to have them sitting doing nothing.
Amid ongoing anxiety within Bungie following layoffs last year, the studio is now preparing for another shakeup, this time on Marathon.
www.ign.com
Barret moved up though to creative director.
Just to let people know: in GaaS often there's two different teams.
One to create and develop the base game that gets shipped at launch, and another one for the post launch stuff (normally know as "live-ops" or "live"), in charge of designing and developing post launch features and content, fixes and server monitoring, management, operation and improvents. In addition to gameplay, monetization and retention metrics monitoring and taking actions to rebalance or improve them.
There are often producers, directors, designers, artists or coders dedicated to only one of these two parts. As an example, there can be a "producer" and a "live producer" or "live-ops producer" (role is the same, names change depending on the studio, sometimes a "live producer" is called simply "producer").
Meaning, very likely this change means that they have Marathon release game pretty much complete other than final tweaks, polishing but mostly testing and bugfixing. Meaning, some key guys can move to start another project (let's say Destiny 3) while other people develops the post launch stuff of the game.
If this is the case, I think Marathon would be released maybe around early next year, since some AAA studios stop adding stuff aprox. a year after release to give enough time for QA, final tweaks & bugfixing.
their gunplay and smoothness is unmatched imo. It always feels good controlling and shooting in their games.
