Has the cost of *Marathon* surged to the brink of $2.5 billion, and is it still worth Sony continuing to bet on it?

I finally turned on my console on Saturday afternoon. I was planning to check out news about new games, but instead the first thing that shocked me was the cost of Marathon. For someone like me, who usually just scrolls through gaming news on the subway and only picks up a controller on weekends, more than $200 million isn’t just a number—it feels like the pressure of countless takeout meals piling up. When that much money gets poured into a project, players really only want to ask one thing: can this game actually make its money back?

Right now, the reports from overseas media are pretty blunt: Bungie’s Lost Starship: Marathon already has a budget exceeding $200 million, and it may even be close to $250 million. And that doesn’t even include the long-term costs of live operations and content updates. It’s like putting down the first payment on a house while not even starting to calculate the monthly mortgage yet. If the spending keeps going, its total cost could even approach the roughly $300 million development scale of Marvel’s Spider-Man 2.

The problem is, Marathon isn’t the kind of big single-player title that can call it a day after one wave of sales. Sony sees it as a key piece in its live-service gaming strategy. That means it has to rely on continuous updates, a stable active player base, and eventually make its money back through microtransactions. The media’s assessment is also very clear: what Marathon needs most right now is to “attract more players, stop the churn, and achieve profitability through microtransactions.” Put plainly, that means you need enough people, and they can’t leave—otherwise it doesn’t matter how expensive the storefront renovation was if no one walks through the door.

That said, Sony’s live-service push over the past few years hasn’t exactly gone smoothly. The Last of Us multiplayer project was canceled, and Concord also failed to meet outside expectations. Looking even further back, Sony spent $3.6 billion to acquire Bungie in the first place, precisely because it wanted this team to help shore up its weaknesses in the live-service space. If Marathon can’t step up now, people are naturally going to start reexamining whether that acquisition was really worth it.

From a player’s perspective, there’s one thing I care about even more: high cost does not equal a great experience, especially for live-service games. A single-player game is like buying a big household appliance as a one-time purchase—expensive, sure, but if it works well, you accept it. A live-service game is more like signing up for a gym membership. The front desk can look as luxurious as it wants, but if you don’t feel like going back three days later, then it’s just wasted money. Marathon is currently facing player churn, which suggests that its most expensive elements may not have turned into its strongest source of appeal.

If you ask me what all this means for ordinary players, my advice is simple: wait and see how future tests are received and how player retention looks after launch—don’t rush into a purchase just for nostalgia or brand loyalty. Bungie absolutely has experience with shooting games, and Sony really does need a live-service flagship that can deliver, but based on the information available right now, Marathon looks more like a project with enormous investment and returns that still haven’t found solid footing. Put it this way: for Sony, this is a high-stakes gamble it can’t afford to lose; for working adults like us with limited free time, the smartest move is still to wait and see, rather than throwing our weekends into a game that might start feeling like overtime at any moment.