Sony are confident Marathon will release by March 2026 and that their live service transition is paying off

Sony remain confident that Bungie’s live service shooter reboot Marathon will launch within their current fiscal year – that is, before March 31st 2026 – and are fairly sure they’ll be able to share an exact release date this autumn. They’ve factored it into their financial forecasts, see.

They’re also pretty upbeat about their live service business at large, which accounted for around 40% of first-party software revenue in their last financial quarter, though they acknowledge that they screwed the pooch with Concord, which got to exist in public for a whole couple of weeks before Sony kicked it into the sun.

All this comes from the publisher’s latest financial earnings call, via Vengeful Giraffe Computing. “First, about Marathon, how we factored it in the forecast, we expect the launch to happen within the fiscal year,” Sony’s chief financial officer Lin Tao commented through an interpreter, when pressed about the game’s release date by an investor. “But, having said that, this is not a commitment. No official announcement has been given yet.”

She added: “We are now doing modifications in development and, based on the progress, in the autumn time frame we believe we can communicate when we can launch [Marathon], either from Bungie or PlayStation.”

All this comes in the context of on-going restructuring at Bungie, who laid off hundreds of people last summer and transferred others to a new studio within Sony. Bungie used to be a “very independent environment” when Sony acquired them in 2022, Tao observed, but “this independence is getting lighter, and Bungie is shifting into a role which is becoming more part of PlayStation Studios, and integration is proceeding.” Slight undertones here of the Emperor in Star Wars commenting that the deflector shield will be quite operational, when your friends arrive.

We here at Rock Paper WSTE-M5 Combat Shotgun were moderately enthused about Bungie’s recent closed Marathon alpha, in terms of the art direction at least. But then came news that it had made unapproved usage of somebody else’s art, and then came an indefinite delay.

In the earnings call, Tao assured that this is unlikely to be another Concord situation. “We are now fixing the problems, so we believe this launch will happen,” she told an investor. “If this launch is cancelled we’d need to do the revision of the valuation, however as of now this is not expected.”

As for Sony’s transition toward live service gaming, she acknowledged that there have been missteps, but pointed out that “if we look at the past five years, five years ago live service games were almost non-existent for PlayStation Studios. We 1754575644 have Helldivers 2, MLB The Show and Gran Turismo 7, and Bungie’s Destiny 2, so we have these four live services contributing to sales and profits in a stable manner.”

The aforesaid 40% proportion of Sony’s revenue represents Sony’s most recent financial quarter. Tao conceded that “for the full year it’s a little less, probably between 20-30%. So in terms of the transformation, it’s not entirely going smoothly, but from a longer-term perspective, if you look at the changes over five years you see that there’s definitely been a change.” Tao did not discuss the reported recent cancellation of two live service games from Sony Bend and Bluepoint, the latter rumoured to have been working on a new God Of War.

My highly original, sage and hilarious closing thought is that Sony could have just told investors that “it’s a Marathon, not a sprint”, then surprise-released some kind of playable teaser called Sprint. What kind of game could Sprint have been? Unfortunately, I have now run out of originality, sagacity and hilarity, so must turn the completion of this sketch over to the comments.