Bungie’s recent Marathon stream where it showed early footage of the first-person extraction shooter sparked skepticism on social media and Reddit, prompting some people to predict it will suffer the same fate as Concord, the hero shooter that Sony took offline less than a month after its release. In response, a former Concord developer made a post on the Marathon subreddit asking people to give it a chance.
“Concord failed to inspire players, and the messages was heard loud and clear,” the developer wrote using a Reddit account under the name MrSpug. “It was gut wrenching to see our project fail, and be the laughing stock of many online.”
The developer, who worked at Firewalk Studios before Sony shuttered it a few months after taking the game down, said they sympathize with the Bungie developers who put a lot of effort into making Marathon and that they commend them for taking a chance in what is an extremely competitive genre.
“I worked on Concord, and did my best,” they wrote. “We came up short, please don’t punish others for our mistakes.”
Although Concord was a different kind of game than Marathon, they’re both still published by Sony. One of the biggest criticisms coming out of the Marathon stream was Bungie’s decision to not go the free-to-play route. Like Concord, Marathon will be cheaper than most new games. Bungie specifically said you can expect to pay less than a “full-priced” title, which might put it somewhere around $40 when it comes out in September. Having a price at all, however, has people wondering if it’ll end up like Concord.
“I really didn’t want to be ‘that’ dev, calling attention to myself as if I have a horse in this race,” the former Concord developer said in a reply to their post. “But to call this game a failure before it’s even out, is wild to me.”
