Blessing Adeoye Jr.

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And we're back with story number three.

Marathon reportedly had a budget of over $200 million.

This is Wesley Yenpool at IGN.

A new report has claimed Marathon's budget is over $200 million, and while player numbers have fallen significantly since launch, Bungie's extraction shooter is allegedly not facing an imminent shutdown.

Forbes reported that the marathon budget is likely more than $250 million.

It's worth noting that this spend allegedly does not include ongoing costs for the live service game nor the development of post-launch content.

Last month, one analyst said, quote,

Marathon hasn't exactly made the splash Sony and Bungie wanted, estimating sales at around 1.2 million copies.

That, Alinea Analytics said, amounted to gross revenues of around $55 million across PC via Steam, PS5, and Xbox.

On Steam, Marathon hit a peak concurrent player count of 88,337 at launch, but that number has fallen steadily over the past month, with the latest 24-hour peak hitting 25,392 players.

Of course, Marathon is also out on PS5 and Xbox, but neither Sony nor Microsoft make player numbers available.

Republic.

Still, PC is clearly the dominant platform for Marathon, with an estimated 70% of the sales, so those Steam concurrence give us a decent idea of how it's tracking.

Bungie is under pressure to deliver for Sony after recent and very public financial failings.

In November, Sony said Bungie had failed to meet its sales and user engagement expectations, recording a 31.5 billion yen, that's approximately $204 million, impairment charge as a result of Destiny 2's underperformance.

That was significantly enough to drag down profits at Sony's game and network services segment, which includes Sony Interactive Entertainment.

According to Forbes, Bungie developers are working hard on new content and there is no danger of an imminent shutdown.

But after what happened to Sony's own Concord and more recently, High Guard, everything surrounding Marathon feels a little on edge.

Roger.