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Bungie Plans to Broaden Marathon Beyond Extraction Shooter Roots After Player Numbers Fall Short

The studio says future work through the end of 2026 will support cooperative PvE, competitive PvP, and Marathon's existing PvPvE tension.

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Marathon players fire weapons at a large alien creature in a purple-lit environment

Bungie is planning a wider survival direction for Marathon after acknowledging that the extraction shooter “did not reach as many players as we had hoped.” In a joint studio update, studio head Poria Torkan and Marathon general manager Josh Deane addressed Bungie’s recent failures while outlining a more focused future for Marathon and Destiny 2. The leaders said the company had “lost sight of what we should be prioritizing most, our players” and would have to earn back player confidence through better decisions and stronger games.

The announcement follows a difficult period for Bungie, including cuts that affected most of the Destiny team and some members of the Marathon team. It also arrives after the June 9 release of Destiny 2 Monument of Triumph, which ended the game’s nine-year run of major content. Bungie says it is not done with Destiny, however, and now intends to restore parts of the game’s vaulted history while reshaping Marathon for a wider audience.

Marathon’s future will cover more than extraction runs

Bungie says it will strengthen Marathon’s combat, world, and competitive tension through the end of 2026 while giving players more control over how they approach the game. The planned direction is meant to support meaningful experiences for cooperative PvE, competitive PvP, and the unpredictable PvPvE format already at the game’s core.

Rather than abandoning Marathon’s identity, the developers say they want to keep what makes it distinctive and expand it into a deeper survival experience. More options could give players different ways to engage with Tau Ceti IV instead of making every session depend on the same extraction-focused loop.

Symbiosis will add permanent PvE in December

Bungie has pointed to the December Symbiosis update as an early example of that broader direction. The planned additions include a permanent PvE mode, a refreshed Perimeter experience, an all-new Runner shell, and Team Deathmatch. Bungie has not given a specific December date, so these remain scheduled features rather than live content.

Team Deathmatch sits outside Marathon’s usual extraction structure, while permanent PvE gives the studio another way to use its world beyond matches built around risking gear and escaping with loot. The additions do not discard the extraction format, but they could give players more control over how much of Marathon’s tension they want in a given session.

Bungie plans to share more about Marathon’s future vision later this week and says it is working toward better ways to hear from players across different playstyles and skill levels.

Player reach remains the immediate problem

Marathon’s player numbers show why Bungie is looking beyond incremental adjustments. Monthly Steam averages fell from 11,441 concurrent players in June to 4,749 in July and 2,827 in August. Those figures do not identify a single reason for the decline, but they show how sharply activity contracted through the summer.

SteamDB records an all-time peak of 88,337 players, while concurrent activity has since fallen to roughly 2,000 players a day. The game’s Steam rating is currently Mixed, giving Bungie’s broader plans a problem that is difficult to solve with balance changes alone.

Bungie had previously pledged to support Marathon for the long term, but the new admission is more direct about the size of the audience problem. The studio now needs its planned changes to bring in players who were not interested in extraction shooters while giving existing players a reason to return. Bungie’s earlier commitment to keep improving Marathon for years remains in place, but the new plan proposes changes to the kind of experience Marathon offers, not just its technical performance or balance.

Destiny 2 gets a restoration plan

Bungie’s most concrete commitment concerns Destiny 2. The studio says it is not done with Destiny and has identified the return of vaulted content as the first step in its recovery plan. Previous campaigns, destinations, and raids will come back and be made available to all Destiny 2 players.

Restoring that material will require more than loading archived files into the current game. Bungie says changes made since Beyond Light require updates to lighting, encounters, combatants, and other underlying systems before older content can meet Destiny 2’s current stability and gameplay standards.

Bringing back those experiences is also meant to repair some of the trust lost when they were removed. Bungie wants to restore parts of Destiny 2’s history while recovering the sense of discovery and shared memories that helped build the game’s community. More information about the restoration plan is due in the months ahead.

Content restoration will sit alongside Marathon’s overhaul rather than replacing it. Bungie reiterated that Marathon was never intended to replace Destiny, positioning the two games as separate parts of the studio’s future even as both require a stronger connection with their communities.

Bungie is changing how it measures success

Torkan and Deane said Bungie has simplified its priorities, reduced competing initiatives, moved decisions closer to the teams building its games, and changed how success is measured. Player satisfaction will receive more emphasis under that approach, while clearer communication should give players a better view of development priorities and any changes to the plan.

Operational changes alone will not restore trust. In the accompanying video, Deane asked players to “keep us accountable” and promised that Bungie would have more to say soon. The studio now has to turn those promises into visible results, especially with Destiny 2’s content restoration still ahead and Marathon’s broader survival direction still being defined.

For Marathon, the next stage will come down to whether permanent PvE, Team Deathmatch, and other survival options can turn its strong moment-to-moment action into a game with a wider audience. Bungie has acknowledged the problem, and the planned Symbiosis additions will show whether a broader direction can give players more reasons to return.

What would make Marathon’s broader survival direction worth returning to for you? Share your thoughts and follow us on X, Bluesky, YouTube, Instagram, Steam, Telegram.

A PvP-focused extraction shooter set on the mysterious planet of Tau Ceti IV, Marathon will see players inhabit the bodies of Runners, cybernetic mercenaries who have been designed to survive the planet’s harsh environments and explore the lost colony that once inhabited Tau Ceti’s surface. Players will engage solo or in crews of three, searching for mysterious alien artifacts, as well as for valuable loot and new weapons and gear that they can add to their collection.