2d ago

Marathon’s director explains why it isn’t free-to-play: ‘Everyone has their own definition of what’s the right price’

www.videogameschronicle.com

Marathon’s director explains why it isn’t free-to-play: ‘Everyone has their own definition of what’s the right price’ | VGC

Marathon will inevitably attract a lot of legitimate criticism, possibly fail outright, and you will have another situation were discussions will be polluted by people blaming all game's wrongs on WOKE.

especially since the bigots decided to hate on it for having "unattractive female characters" even though they literally JUST COMPLAINED about how Emma Frost in Marvel Rivals looks like a "200lb man post surgery in drag" even though she has Jiggle physics and a skin that 's about as revealing as one can get without upping the game's age rating (AKA literally EVERYTHING they want)

do they think that we have the memory of a goldfish or something?

15 comments

Is this new game even connected at all to the original Marathon?
- Nope. It's a multiplayer extraction shooter with a season-based model. Think Tarkov but worse somehow.
  no game, only microtransactions!
  Literally zero connection to the original games, other than the name.
  
  That fucking sucks. I feel like a proper remake, like what happened with System Shock, could be really neat. But I guess not :/
- ig its slightly related in that its on tau ceti IV after it got destroyed by the pfhor maybe?
  my interest in the trailer plummeted dramatically after the opening. Doesnt seem to have any of the things that I liked about the original

Maybe I'm just old and busy but I simply cannot imagine what the appeal of this kind of game model is.
Pay to get in the door. Game is incredibly sparse at first, maybe more content happens later, probably for more money. Have to have two other people do it too. Need to all be reliably free to play at the same time. But also that can't be when it suits the three of you because everything is season based, with a gameplay design based on snowballing loot / abilities that makes it more difficult for anyone but the hardcore to get into it or succeed as the season goes on, in a genre that's already incredibly hostile to anyone by hardcore players who put in hundreds of hours or stream for a living, chock full of timed battlepasses to further compound the issue, that stops the snowball from getting so bad that the game would loose all its players by just basically resetting everything at the end of the season and wiping what little you have managed to unlock, meaning you have to start the cycle all over again at the start of the next season to stand a chance.
The amount of money, time, effort, and working around their schedule you're being asked to do for a game like this is worse than joining an MLM scheme.
- But have you considered how many macrotransactions they can fit in it. Escape from Tarkov was selling some crap for $250 a pop and it didnt even have everything.
  Youre thinking "how can this game be fun" which is not the consideration of the people in charge of coordinating a project like this. They're thinking "how much money can we get for as little creative work as possible"

Any girls on here with this vibe or look please contact me.
- One day this style of companionship procurement will actually work and I'll have no idea what to do and fuck it up by asking them if they're gunna' boycott Switch2 instead of asking them about their hobbies or whatever.

Extraction shooters is something i did once, enjoyed the experience once, never went back to. And i only did it because tarkov appealed to me specifically just cos of its style just tickles me for some reason. Unless people are looking to jump ship to another extraction shooter I feel like this will flop hard. Running on the IP of marathon is odd cos its really not well known
- Honestly, I can picture the pitch meeting being - "okay we ran out of Halo, we're out of Destiny, what else do we have in the back catalogue. The fuck is Marathon?? Sure slap that over the microtransaction genre de jure and the hogs will eat that slop up."
  I guess its not as cynical as turning it into a gacha game
- Replied to the wrong comment 🫠

To be fair, I wouldn't want to play this even if it were free

"Our definition is that you better open your wallets and give us a lotta money for this." Actually $40 doesn't seem so bad.
I'm not into the pvp escape from tarkov thing. I've tried it, it's just not for me even a little. It doesn't really make sense to make this a pay to play game - I don't think people who like fps games wanna pay for them when they have a lot on offer for free, I don't think extraction shooter people wanna pay for this, people who like Marathon probably have long moved on to different single player games and if you want a sci fi head trip game - I doubt an extraction shooter is the way to explore that.
It feels like they wanna double dip, get the people who are willing to pay for it then a year later or whatever let it go free to play before it inevitably collapses due to no interest.

This could have had a shot if it was Free2play. Sadly for the devs I doubt it will workout as a paid title. Even at 40$. Hope Im wrong for the devs sake.... I do like the way it looks.

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