Well, this will help Bungie further. A developer of the PS flop Concord and the MMORPG flop WildStar, the artist Stephan William, spoke on April 14 in the subreddit of Marathon and explicitly supports Bungie. The extraction shooter is already under heavy criticism and is being compared to Sony’s money pit Concord months before its release.
This is the situation: Sony bought the developer Bungie for 3.5 billion US dollars. Their new extraction shooter Marathon is set to be released in September 2025, but it is already facing criticism: Fans of the PvE shooter Destiny don’t really understand why Bungie is now developing a PvP shooter. There are already enough of those.
In 2023, Sony bought the developer team Firewalk Studios, which included some former employees of Bungie. They developed the hero shooter Concord, which later proved to be a massive flop and a money pit for Sony.
Now an employee from Concord is supporting the people at Bungie and defending them against criticism. One of the main criticisms was that Marathon would turn out to be a flop for Sony just like Concord.
No one suffers as much from a flop as the developers
This is what the developer of Concord says: In the subreddit of Marathon, Stephen Walker speaks as “MrSprug”. The VFX artist says:
He is now 40 and has worked on big games for 17 years.
It pained him greatly when Concord became a laughing stock on the internet, and he learned from the game’s failure:
No one feels as bad as the people who invested time hoping that their game entertains the global masses of gamers.
He wants to praise the people developing Marathon for taking a risk, trying something new, and creating a game that has no guarantee of success. That requires a lot of courage.
People should not punish Bungie for Concord’s failure. Everyone is human and is trying to create something great.
He then goes on to say that for him it is wrong to call Marathon a failure now before it has even been released.
During the conversation, it comes out that the poor developer not only worked on Concord but also on the unfortunate MMORPG WildStar.
Games can also fail for reasons unrelated to the game
This is what it’s about: News like this remind us that there are people behind the games who are often judged harshly. A developer from Dragon Age complained in February 2025 about the ridicule directed at game designers.
Especially in the current culture on social media or Twitch, factors unrelated to the game can significantly contribute to a game’s success, but also to its failure – whether that is objectively justified or just a “general feeling”:
- Concord fell victim to public debate claiming the game supposedly preached a “woke culture.”
- In Starfield, pronouns became a topic
- In Dragon Age, it was criticized that during character creation there was an option to show cosmetic scars in the chest area
- Now Marathon bears the burden of the last few years of Destiny, which did not go well and robbed the previously glorious game developer of much of its shine.
In the end, this has nothing to do with the actual game and the passion of the developers. It is a legitimate request not to prejudge such games until they are released. Even a game like Marvel Rivals was written off as a flop before release, but then became extremely successful.
Although even the friendliest person might have to say that the signs for Marathon are currently not good. The fact that such words are coming from a developer of two legendary flops like Concord and WildStar carries a certain irony. One would have liked to hear kind words from the Balatro developer or Swen Vincke from Baldur’s Gate 3: Why is Concord such a catastrophic flop on Steam and PS5, burning $250 million for Sony over a woke catastrophe?
