‘Arc Raiders’ is now an even bigger problem for Bungie’s ‘Marathon’

While the game has always been against Bungie Marathontrying to make an impact on the less-than-traditional fetch shooter market with a hero-based concept somewhat antithetical to the genre, Arc Raiders only made things much more difficult.

We talked about this some time ago with Arc Raiders alpha landed in the middle of Marathons alpha, and the conversation quickly turned to quality Bow it was and how much work Marathon still necessary, despite the fact Marathon was supposed to come out first.

Now the “server slam” open beta test of Arc Raiders posted staggering numbers, a concurrent total of 190,000 on Steam. Even with a $40 price tag at the end of the day, the game has already become the #3 best-selling game on Steam after this review’s strong impression, and it looks like it will have a huge launch for the relatively small studio, Embark.

If Arc Raiders is proving to be a big success when it launches in less than two weeks, as it seems almost guaranteed to be the case, which spells big trouble for Marathon. Not only because it’s a great game in a genre it’s trying to break into, but also because it’s coming out now. before the marathonwhereas previously this was not supposed to be the case.

The initial plan for Marathon was going to be its own open beta in August before launching on September 23, more than a month before Arc Raiders. This would have allowed a certain number of purchases without Bow being live, testing aside.

But now, Marathon will find itself in a situation where if it succeeds in the fourth quarter of this financial year before March 31, 2026, as Sony claims, it will now be 3 to 5 months after Arc Raiders has already potentially enticed millions of people to buy the game and invest the time to prepare and progress to higher stages of the shooter. SO, Marathon comes in and asks people for an extra $40. Previously, the challenge for Marathon was both to find new genre actors or to remove them from staples like Tarkov. NOW, Arc Raiderswhich has got new players and removed them from other shooters, will be established and it’s another thing Marathon we will have to siphon off the one that is new and shiny. Frame.

This weekend, the Arc Raiders The design director actually brought up Marathon when speaking to PC Gamer about the overlapping alphas:

“It was pure coincidence that they took their test around the time we did. To my knowledge, I don’t think any of us knew this was going to happen,” Watkins said. “It was a really good A/B test for us because obviously they made decisions that we didn’t make, and vice versa. So we were able to kind of compare and contrast how some of these things played out.”

I don’t take this as a dig Marathonbecause the two are very different with Marathon have a hero-based model, while Arc Raiders uses more traditional, classless custom characters. Arc Raiders is in the third person while Marathon is a traditional Bungie FPS. Although both are mining games with constantly lost loot and PvE components, of course. Arc Raiders was also not tainted by a plagiarism scandal like Marathon was shortly after this alpha.

I always said I just don’t think Marathon it will work, but Arc Raiders sold a few million copies just a few months before Marathon will try to do the same thing, in the exact same genre, with a game with less good vibes, which can be almost impossible.

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