I know this is going to sound crazy coming from somebody who loves Marathon, but I think a lot of what's hurting the game comes down to marketing. And I would say the same thing about video game marketing in general, it needs to get better.
You might be asking how I got here
On the pod we were talking about Bungie's gunplay. One of the guys said he didn't realize how good Bungie was with gunplay until he put real time into Marathon because he missed the whole Destiny wave. And I was like, that right there is the problem. I don't think I've seen it either outside of clips on TikTok. I know Bungie puts out content. But if somebody who plays games all the time doesn't know your studio's biggest strength, your marketing isn't reaching people.
And Bungie of all studios. They made Halo 1, 2, 3, ODST and Reach. Then they made Destiny 1 and 2. That's a huge generation of games.
Marathon is what you get from a studio that did both
I'm going to say this and it's going to sound crazy but let it build. Halo, great gunplay, artistic maps and scenery, but it wasn't on the same artistic level as what came after. Then you get Destiny where I think they had it twice fold because they had already made the Halo babies. They got to go crazier with everything, maps, guns, designs. Then you get Marathon and Marathon is both of those on crack. That's why the art direction and the sound hit the way they do. I broke that down more in my Marathon review.
My cohost Ray had a good point about why a lot of people our age don't connect Bungie to any of that. Halo popped off when we were kids. Not everybody grew up on Halo 2, 3 and Reach. A lot of people grew up on WWE games and 2K. So if the studio isn't telling that story now, the history doesn't do anything for them.
How you actually combat hate
There's a lot of hate on Marathon online and Ray said it best, a lot of it is grifters on Twitter hating on a new game just to hate on it while the people actually playing it are having fun. The thing that's keeping the game alive right now is the community. Bungie updating it constantly and the players defending it every day. That's legit how you combat hate, and it's the same thing I wrote about in how games turn players into brand advocates.
So if there are any marketers reading this, here's the thing. Haters wake up 24/7 to hate. If you think being the nice guy for one hour out of the day is going to be enough, it's not going to be enough. You're losing that fight on volume alone. And gamers can smell a brand trying too hard anyway, so you can't fake it either.
And I'll say this too, some of these people posting Steam charts at 7 in the morning when everybody's at work could just be a bot doing it. It dead serious could be AI. I've been using a lot of AI agents lately myself so I know what they can do. Which is why you can't let a chart screenshot be the loudest thing people see about your game.
Give me the animation
The thing I need more of from studios, especially in an era where people love animation and cool stuff and we're talking about culture, is more of what Marathon did before it came out. That short film Alberto Mielgo made for them was fire. We need more of that.
How many times have people in the Apex community been saying Apex needs to make a real animation? They have the shorts, people want more. And the perfect example of somebody doing it and it working is League of Legends. They made Arcane and I watched it as somebody who doesn't even play that game like a lot of people did and I was like bro this is phenomenal. Arcane went on to win the Emmy for Outstanding Animated Program in 2022. That's a show that made people care about a game they never played. It's on my list of game adaptations that fixed the curse for a reason.
Marathon needs to go into that. Show this world at a different level, on a different medium. The world building is already there. The characters, the factions, the aesthetic.
The player count is a marketing problem too
Ray's take on the pod was that the numbers were always going to drop. Marathon launched on March 5 and peaked at 88,337 people at once on Steam that month according to SteamDB, and by July the monthly peak was down to 14,809. Since August it's been peaking at a few thousand. Some of that is the game being hard and some of it is the season cycle, the good players finish everything and there's nothing left to grind until the next season. He also said the people who really play it love it the same way a niche artist's fans love that artist and that loyalty might bring it back. I agree with him.
But the hate on Twitter and the people who never even tried it, that's on marketing. If people only find out about your best stuff from a random TikTok clip, they're going to believe whatever chart somebody posts at 7 AM. Chat runs the show now, so studios have to show up where chat is.
So here's my question for you, what's a game you only fell in love with because of something outside the game, a show, a short, a creator, and what game do you think deserves its own Arcane next? Put it in the CXM Discord.
Your call
Did I get this ranking right?
In this story
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