The upcoming 2025 extraction shooter Marathon has been all over the news recently, and not for many good reasons. Though its official gameplay reveal in April was received decently well, it and its developer — Destiny 2 creator Bungie — have since been marred in multiple controversies. Now, a former developer has spoken out against what they feel is troublesome leadership at the studio.
The comments came from a BlueSky user named Spirited who formerly worked at Bungie on both Destiny 2 and Marathon as an online services engineer.
“As a former Bungie employee who worked on Marathon, I feel for those still at the studio,” they wrote in a now-deleted post. “Working with engineering / Marathon leadership was extremely toxic and humiliating. I won’t speak about the rest, but Bungie leadership needs to be gutted completely.”
It’s a scathing statement, and one that comes just days after Bungie found itself in the middle of an art theft scandal in which the developer admitted it stole and used artwork from an artist’s 2017 poster designs while developer Marathon. The company said in a response that it was “committed to do right by the artist” and that it had reached out, though similar controversies have now happened four times since 2021.
Over this past weekend, Forbes’ Paul Tassi also reported that morale at Bungie is in “free-fall,” and that “the vibes have never been worse.” Employees throughout the studio are fearing what might happen to Bungie if Marathon fails to perform well commercially, all while the developer has had to scrap its plan to launch preorders this summer and is considering a “roadmap of public playtests” instead of a full Open Beta in August.
All of this bad news follows a disappointing series of Closed Alpha gameplay tests that ran through late April to early May, with most of the feedback from players either lukewarm or fairly negative outright. Notably, Forbes’ report indicates that Bungie leadership often ignored warnings from developers about what would and wouldn’t be good for Marathon, with the need for a strong PvE element mentioned specifically.
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