5 months from launch, Marathon devs keep evading pricing questions, but Bungie promises that "it's definitely going to be a conversation"

Concept art shows a Marathon character standing behind blue smoke.
(Image credit: Bungie)

New extraction shooter Marathon is inching closer to its September 23 release date, but we still have no idea what it will cost – and developer Bungie seems hellbent on keeping it that way.

Bungie already made a half-hearted attempt at soothing people's fears by writing in a Twitter post that "Marathon will not be a 'full-priced' title," and assistant director Del Chafe just repeated the line with equal half-heartedness in a recent interview with streamer DrLupo.

"Yeah, I saw that on Twitter," DrLupo responds.

Chafe continues to say that "I can't go into details, but what I'll say is – we're not ready to talk about it right now, but [...] we'll have conversations about this. When we're ready, we'll share some of the stuff we're talking about. Like, you and a bunch of other people are going to have really good feedback about it."

Presumably, the "other people" Chafe is referring to here denote other content creators like DrLupo, with millions of followers. I find that disappointing, considering the fact that there are plenty of not-famous gamers currently struggling under the weight of their increasingly expensive hobby.

Chafe reiterates that price is "definitely going to be a conversation," since one of Bungie's "big goals here – especially kicking this off with alpha – is to build this game and build a community around it. And so, we want to do that collaboratively. We want that perspective that helps us do what the players most care about."

Unless players care most about knowing Marathon's price five months before it launches, it seems.

Any live service game is a risk, but Sony and Bungie are betting Marathon can make extraction shooters bigger: "I do think that the ceiling could rise."

Ashley Bardhan
Senior Writer

Ashley is a Senior Writer at GamesRadar+. She's been a staff writer at Kotaku and Inverse, too, and she's written freelance pieces about horror and women in games for sites like Rolling Stone, Vulture, IGN, and Polygon. When she's not covering gaming news, she's usually working on expanding her doll collection while watching Saw movies one through 11.

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