The gaming industry is in a very interesting and unpredictable position right now, but nobody feels the heat more than live service games. However, it doesn’t look like this will stop Bungie any time soon.
After a rocky road to release, Marathon’s developers have spoken up that they are in the game “for the long haul,” even amid all the noise about how the game has underperformed for a live service title. Maybe more gaming industry execs should take note.
Rather than an abstract collection of SteamDB screenshots, successful live service titles are a culmination of well-executed updates, quality server infrastructure, and decent PR. All three of these factors have been found lacking, with Fortnite’s boss’s bizarre framing of layoffs as opportunities to hire great staff coming to mind.
Marathon Teases Major Performance Gains in the Long Run
The team at Marathon released the latest settings optimization how-to together with a summary of what future improvements will be in terms of both performance and visual quality.
Under the Future Improvements plan, the team was candid about how Marathon is the first DirectX 12 title developed by Bungie. Despite the natural challenges that come with working with new APIs, many gamers have noticed how Marathon has grown visually over the past year in tandem with player feedback. It’s not an exaggeration to say that the community voices, including (perhaps even especially) the harsher ones during early testing, were crucial in turning Marathon into the game it is today.
Successful live service titles are a culmination of well-executed updates, quality server infrastructure, and decent PR
In the search for performance, Bungie developers mentioned that they “aren’t ready to provide specifics yet, we have identified some smaller improvements that we can make soon, particularly to improve CP performance. We also have longer-term changes planned that will further improve CPU performance. Our plan is to get improvements out as soon as we can, rather than wait to drop them all at the same time.”
Bungie is planning “many years of steady improvements to every aspect of the game,” and though it’s early days, these are promising signs for runners who waited so long to get into Marathon.
The Marathon dev team’s enthusiasm for the game is great to see, but even more promising is the commitment to the big picture. One month of sales and player count graphics doesn’t mean that the rest of the game is suddenly a failure. Marathon managed to sell just over 1.2 million copies in the following week of its release, with PC players taking the lead. The game’s art direction and quality have all the hallmarks of an extraction shooter classic, so long as Bungie can keep plans on track.
