Marathon Marketing Plans in Jeopardy – WGB

Bungie is a studio struggling to stay afloat these days, even with the backing of parent company Sony. They’ve now found themselves embroiled in more trouble, and according to Forbes morale is almost non-existent. Now, a new source has revealed that things might be even worse for Bungie and Marathon as marketing seems to have been pulled.

Speaking on the latest episode of Sacred Symbols, former IGN journalist and now podcaster Colin Moriarty addressed the recent Bungie controversy revolving around yet another case of plagiarism, the 4th such case for the studio. During the discussion with his co-hosts, Colin revealed that he had talked to someone behind the scenes and learned and interesting tidbit.

“I was told by someone familiar with marketing plans in a key overseas market that there are now no plans to do paid marketing for Marathon at all,” said Colin. “I don’t know if those plans were affected by what has recently happened or if that was always the plan or whatever, but it is considered a fairly unusual move for a game of this high profile.”

Exactly what this means for Marathon and Bungie is up for debate. Personally, I think this is probably due to them having to pause any and all marketing simply because they have to investigate and remove all the stolen art. If they continue marketing the game, they risk publically displaying more of it and getting themselves into further trouble. It could also point to a delay incoming. Marathon is currently set to release on September 23, but depending on how long it takes them to remove the artwork in question, the game could wind up being delayed. The recent beta feedback was also very mixed, so they could use a delay to work on the game a little more, too.

Of course, as always insider reports must be taken with a pinch of salt. Usually with such instances, Colin would state whether he as able to verify the source etc. but in this case didn’t mention how trustworthy he thought the information was. However, in my experience, Colin doesn’t usually throw out things like this if he isn’t at least fairly confident that it’s accurate.