Marathon, Sony’s latest games-as-a-service bet, a risk for PlayStation too

Since basically every single day in a yearly calendar is a something day, we can call this one, well, Marathon day: Sony’s ambitious online extraction shooter launches today on the PlayStation5, Xbox Series S/X and PC, complete with the high expectations everyone has from Bungie, the company that brought the Halo and Destiny series of games to millions of consumers. It costs $39.99 on the PS Store, the Xbox Store and Steam – there’s also a Digital Deluxe Edition of it, offering various extras, for $59.99.

Marathon is a first-person multiplayer extraction shooter, set on a planet called Tau Ceti IV and taking place far into the future. Humans from the UESC Marathon – a ship constructed out of the Martian moon Deimos – started a new colony on Tau Ceti, but after almost a century of it the ship disappearing it returned to the planet’s orbit. Shortly after its arrival an unknown event caused the majority of the colonists to disappear. Earth and its many factions and mega corporations – having a stake in this endeavor – hire “Runners”, humans who have given up their bodies for specialized cybernetic ones, to infiltrate the colony, fight against both rival Runners and alien forces on the planet, and retrieve valuable artifacts, data and resources.

Each match in Marathon centers around deploying into a shared environment, searching for loot and attempting to successfully extract before being eliminated by enemy players or environmental threats. Gameplay is primarily focused on player-versus-player (PvP) encounters, although the game does feature player-versus-environment (PvE) elements too, including AI-controlled enemies and hazards.

The game can host up to six three-player teams in each match – players can also participate as solo or duo operatives at a disadvantage, if they so choose – who navigate a hostile world, balancing risk and reward. Items collected during a match are permanently lost if the player fails to extract successfully, while items collected on successful extractions can obviously be used in future matches.

Rather than featuring a traditional single-player campaign, Marathon incorporates evolving narrative elements shaped by player actions and decisions over time (unfolding across in-game seasons and events). Players have access to extensive customization options, including different character builds, weapons, gear and abilities. The title offers both solo and team-based play, supporting full cross-platform play and cross-save functionality for all players (regardless of their entertainment system of preference).

Launches are strange when circumstances are stranger

Marathon launches at a point in time where a lot of things are happening – and changing – at Sony in PlayStation terms, all at once. The PS5 is leading the video games market, but it has only offered one (1) successful game-as-a-service title so far, Helldivers 2, with half a dozen others silently cancelled over the last three years. The spectacular failure of Concord back in 2024 still casts a shadow on Sony’s similar efforts, but the company keeps investing in these productions because that’s what its investors would like to see: recurring revenue from games that belong to PlayStation Studios, not just to third parties.

For these types of games to truly deliver on their promise and potential, they need to be released on more than one platform or, ideally, be designed to work across formats from day one – which Marathon does for that exact reason. It will certainly help but not mitigate the risk of failure, as Highguard developers – who are shutting down the title less than two months after launch – found out recently. Bungie is much more experienced than Wildlight, but it has a lot to prove with Marathon, as its acquisition by Sony has been heavily criticized as expensive, unnecessary and, so far, unsuccessful. It might not sound fair, but it’s not wide of the mark either.

The practically forced multiplatform approach of Helldivers 2 and Marathon appears to be in sharp contrast to other moves Sony is making too. Bloomberg’s recent report, for instance, claiming that PlayStation will no longer be bringing over most of its AAA exclusive games to PC, is one such move. Online games-as-a-service and cinematic, single player games are different beasts, yes. Platform strategies and commercial plans do change and adapt over time, yes. The way Sony has been handling all of this over the last few years, though, has been inconsistent and unpredictable, causing consumer confusion and inviting uncomfortable questions often left unanswered, which is far from ideal for the PlayStation platform in the long run.

Will this Sony game-as-a-service manage to stand out?

It’s in this context that Marathon launches today, after a week of closed network testing – Bungie called it Server Slam and, in Steam terms at least, the company was not far off. Yours truly does not consider himself an expert in extraction shooters so he did not participate in this testing phase, but initial impressions of other journalists playing it seem to be rather mixed. Many of them praised the bold visual design and the soundtrack of the game, while others criticized its steep learning curve and user interface. It will be interesting to see, then, what gamers themselves will think of it now… and what they will think of it a few months down the line.

It will also be interesting to see how Bungie and Sony plan to support Marathon over time. The title has not been heavily promoted yet in terms of marketing, but Bungie did confirm – in an extensive PlayStation blog post – that multiple seasons of it are already planned out and a new game mode will be added soon, along with new characters and upgrades. Since this is a game-as-a-service, Marathon is widely expected to change over time based on players’ feedback, evolving into something more in line with their expectations and preferences. Helldivers 2 is now quite a different game to what it was at launch, after all, and definitely a better one.

The fact that Marathon is seemingly the only title of this type Sony Interactive Entertainment will be publishing in 2026 – FairGame$ is MIA and Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls is a completely different game – just puts more pressure on Bungie to make this a success. Despite the company’s past achievements, it won’t be easy: both casual and hardcore gamers have a lot of options nowadays (many of them free-to-play but of high enough quality to satisfy almost everyone), so every new online title contesting for consumers’ time and money will really have to earn both. As of right now, Marathon is as likely to pull that off as it isn’t. Interesting times ahead, no?