After a tumultuous development cycle, Bungie's new extraction shooter, Marathon, has been released. As you can imagine, Marathon (2026) is a lot different to Marathon (1994), just as Bungie has also become a very different studio over the past three decades.
There's nothing that encapsulates the change in Bungie's DNA more than the aggressive monetisation of Marathon. We all understand that creating games is an expensive endeavour, and we all understand that capitalism necessitates never-ending growth, so triple-A developers need to find ways of creating consistent revenue to please investors and executives.
However, there are tasteful ways of monetising a game, and distasteful ways of monetising a game, and Bungie leans into the latter with Marathon.
Firstly, Marathon is a $40 game. It is not a free-to-play experience and should not be afforded the same grace that free-to-play games get when they nickel-and-dime their player base.
Firstly, Marathon has a premium battle pass that costs 1,000 Lux ($9.99). The concept of placing content behind a paid pass that players have to grind through was a masterstroke of gaming monetisation, because the developer collects revenue at the initial purchase and then the player...
