Bungie delays Marathon indefinitely

Bungie has indefinitely delayed its upcoming first-person extraction shooter, Marathon.

In a blog post, the PlayStation-owned Destiny 2 developer says the game will no longer make its original September 23, 2025, launch date in an effort to better address player feedback. Bungie notes that a recent Alpha test “created an opportunity for us to calibrate and focus the game on what will make it uniquely compelling—survival under pressure, mystery and lore around every corner, raid-like endgame challenges, and Bungie’s genre-defining FPS combat.”

Specifically, the developer says it will continue closed tests to address “immediate focus” areas, including:

• “More challenging and engaging AI encounters”
• “More rewarding runs, with new types of loot and dynamic events”
• “Making combat more tense and strategic”
• “Increased visual fidelity”
• “More narrative and environmental storytelling”
• “A better player experience for solo/duos”

Bungie says it will share more on its progress from these updates, as well as a new release date, in the fall.

Notably, this delay comes after Sony Interactive Entertainment Business Group CEO Hermen Hulst admitted that feedback to Marathon has been “varied” so far. In a fireside chat for investors, Hulst specifically noted that PlayStation is committed to avoiding the mistakes that led to the failure of Concord. That multiplayer shooter, which was led by Destiny alums at Firewalk Studios, released to mixed reviews and low player counts, leading PlayStation to take it offline and shutter the game’s developer entirely.

In the wake of all of this, Hulst assured investors that PlayStation has improved its development processes.

“We’ve introduced much more rigorous processes for validating—for revalidating our creative, our commercial, our development assumptions and hypotheses, and we now do that on a much more ongoing basis,” Hulst said. “That’s the plan that will ensure we’re investing in the right opportunities at the right time, all while maintaining much more predictable timelines.”

It remains to be seen what will come out of all of that. It should be noted that Concord is far from the only PlayStation live service game to suffer, despite PlayStation’s lofty former goal of leveraging Bungie to help ship more than 10 live service games by 2026.

To date, Sony has axed multiplayer games based on The Last of Us, Twisted Metal, Spider-Man and God of War, as well as others based on new IPs. And most recently, Jade Raymond, the Canadian producer and head of PlayStation-owned Haven in Montreal, departed the studio amid rumours of quality concerns surrounding its Fairgame$ competitive heist game. Last year’s Helldivers 2 has so far been the only new game from PlayStation’s big live service push to be successful.

Hopefully, PlayStation has learned from these blunders and will help Bungie ship something that’s more Helldivers and less Concord. Marathon is set to come to PS5, Xbox Series X/S and PC.

With Marathon‘s delay, two marquee first-party PlayStation 5 games are still on the 2025 calendar: Kojima Productions’ Death Stranding 2: On the Beach (June 26) and Sucker Punch’s Ghost of Yōtei (October 2).

Image credit: PlayStation

Source: Bungie

Update: 17/06/2025 at 3:46 p.m. ET — Added mention of PlayStation’s remaining 2025 PS5 games.