LogInThe studio is taking more time to address issues with Marathon's gameplay and visuals, and is even planning to add a proximity chat.
To the surprise of virtually no one, Bungie has officially announced that their upcoming extraction shooter Marathon, which recently found itself entangled in numerous controversies, pertaining for the most part to art theft and a growing divide between the studio's developers and management, will not be released on the planned September 23 and has been postponed indefinitely.
Bungie
"Through every comment and real-time conversation on social media and Discord, your voice has been strong and clear," writes Bungie in the official statement announcing the delay, referencing the backlash the studio and Marathon's Alpha version have received.
As such, the team has acknowledged they "need more time to craft Marathon into the game that truly reflects your passion" and thus will not be able to meet the previously announced release date, promising to return in the Fall to showcase the progress they will have made by then and reveal a new launch day.
"The Alpha test created an opportunity for us to calibrate and focus the game on what will make it uniquely compelling – survival under pressure, mystery and lore around every corner, raid-like endgame challenges, and Bungie's genre-defining FPS combat," reads the announcement.
"We're using this time to empower the team to create the intense, high-stakes experience that a title like Marathon is built around. This means deepening the relationship between the developers and the game's most important voices: our players. Over the next few months, we'll continue closed testing (including participants from the Alpha) to deploy gameplay updates and test new features as they come online."
Although this decision is likely a net positive for Marathon and has pleased both the game's haters and its fans – who seemed to agree, though for different reasons, that the title shouldn't stick to its original release date – Bungie wouldn't be Bungie if this announcement came without its own controversy.
According to Forbes' Paul Tassi, most of Bungie's developers were informed about Marathon's delay at the same time and in the same way as the gaming community – through the official announcement – and were not warned beforehand.
If true, which it might as well not be, given that Paul's sources are anonymous and cannot be confirmed, this would not only highlight once again the rift between Bungie's devs and corpos, but also call into question the fixes they plan to implement, making the list attached above seem less like a structured development roadmap and more like a rushed list of demands developers weren't prepared for and will now have to scramble to meet – making it more likely that Marathon will launch in 2026 at the earliest.
That, combined with earlier reports that Bungie "absolutely cannot afford" for Marathon to fail and the May 2026 release of GTA VI – meaning it's unwise to launch anything else around that time – calls the entire exercise into question and is sure to raise doubts about whether it would actually be smarter for both Bungie and Sony to cancel Marathon altogether, rather than trying to ship a game whose reputation some agree is already beyond fixing.
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