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Are you looking to check out Marathon before its launch?
"Hello there, welcome back to GLTV News, I'm Alex, as always going through the afternoons latest and greatest when it comes to gaming, technology, entertainment, whatever you like and indeed whatever you love, we always have it here for you at GLTV News and in the wider Gamereactor networks as a whole, so if you like what you see and you want to see more be sure to check out Gamereactor wherever you get it from for more gaming reviews, gaming previews, movie reviews, series reviews, exclusives, interviews, world news, sports news and of course so much more."
"Without further ado then, today we're talking Bungie's Marathon, the fact that there is a new playtest coming. Now this game was delayed indefinitely, it was meant to have launched already I believe towards the late September as Ben writes here, however that isn't the world that we're living in and instead we're living in the one where Marathon got delayed, pushed out of, likely out of release this year, although there are still plans apparently to have it released in this fiscal year, meaning by the end of March 2026. However, we don't have a direct update from Bungie until now when there's a new playtest coming, so the game has gone back into beta phase and in this blog post Bungie writes that they are essentially gathering playtesters to test out Marathon once more from the 22nd of October to the 28th of October. This will feature three maps, five runners, proximity chat, retuned combat pacing, solo queue, deeper environmental storytelling and more. The technical test however is still marked as a build in progress and we shouldn't basically consider it as the final product. The playtest will happen in North America and Europe, so sorry if you're not within those regions, and will be available on all the platforms that Marathon is planning on launching on, that is PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X slash S. You'll have to sign up before the 16th of October if you want to sign up to be a part of this and then sign an NDA, which might be a sound big and spooky and scary if you're not sort of used to taking part in playtests or taking part in things that do require an NDA, but basically means just don't spread loads of stuff about the game before it launches because Bungie is still quite cautious about Marathon it seems and doesn't really want mass community opinion either peaking or lowering the game's expectations from its fanbase. Marathon is, if I can get a sort of, I guess a bit more subjective for a moment, Marathon does seem to be one of those games that feels like perhaps a last gasp of the live action, live service era, sorry I would say. Unfortunately live service games have been pretty much a coin flip on whether they will be incredibly profitable or incredibly expensive for a lot of big companies."
"We saw Concord last year, really really flopped for Sony, less than 25,000 players it was reported for that game total and it shut down within two weeks. Marathon might have been heading in the same direction if you consider that a lot of people were just sort of blase about it. It's also a game that will be priced, it won't be free to play when it launches, which is again another thing that could perhaps ruin its chances of really rocketing to the top of say like the Steam stores, sorry the Steam play accounts and things like that."
"We have seen some live service successes in recent years, Marvel Rivals is probably the biggest one that comes to mind, however when you have a Marvel Rivals and a Helldivers 2 and things like that up against say Marathon and Ark Raiders which looks to be like it's going to again draw quite a lot of numbers then is there space for all of these games that are constantly competing with each other? Let me know and I'll see you tomorrow for some more GLTV news, goodbye."
