Hilarious that OP and the author are dismissing this as a conspiracy when the article even explicitly says that the author was able to join the discord in question and found exactly what it was described as, an astroturfing platform. Totally impossible that an announcement could have been deleted after it was leaked.
this post was submitted on 26 Mar 2026
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It stole artwork. It took established IP and shoehorned it into the trending genre instead of its own genre. It doesn’t support Linux, it is a predatory microtransaction filled “live service” game
Plenty of non conspiratorial reasons to hate Marathon.
there's plenty of reason to hate it but, to be absolutely clear, paid reddit posts are rarely conspiracy. that is a very popular method on reddit specifically. that isn't to say that "marathon devs definitely paid people to post on reddit" etc. just to say, it's a little difficult to immediately dismiss that as a concept when it's so fucking common on reddit.
This entire article reads like fake controvery as marketing. Yawn.
Or for just being an always-online game. I can hate it for that too.
I'll hate it because Bungie tried to pass off stolen art without crediting and paying the actual artist
AGAIN
and again, they fired the one guy responsible for that "mistake"
They fired the fall guy. More than half of the art team followed antireal on one platform or another, they all knew they were stealing
Okay look, as much as I hate Nu-Marathon and NeoBungie, it was only a few in-game (most likely placeholder) textures in a beta build of the game. Anyone trying to claim the entire game was stolen has no idea what they are talking about. It's wrong that it happened but in the bigger picture, it's a very minor issue compared to other things with other games.
As a side note, and as an artist myself: Artists do not "own" an art style. Marathon's art style is not stolen. Brutalism in graphic design existed since the late 1990s. Monet doesn't "own" impressionism, Dali doesn't "own" surrealism, Warhol doesn't "own" pop-art. They never have. Anime and manga have been using that art style in their design and marketing for a very long time. Anime being a pretty big influence on Bungie during the time they were making old Marathon, Halo CE, and most obviously, Oni.
As a side note, and as an artist myself: Artists do not "own" an art style. Marathon's art style is not stolen. Brutalism in graphic design existed since the late 1990s. Monet doesn't "own" impressionism, Dali doesn't "own" surrealism, Warhol doesn't "own" pop-art. They never have. Anime and manga have been using that art style in their design and marketing for a very long time. Anime being a pretty big influence on Bungie during the time they were making old Marathon, Halo CE, and most obviously, Oni.
Maybe you should look up what happened.
I hate to wear some tinfoil but I'd 100% be unsurprised if Bungie or Sony were doing 'marketing campaigns' using stuff like astroturfing to promote their game. Its not really uncommon on Reddit and I have seen small/medium sized companies attempt stuff like this in an attempt to go viral.
All that being said, there's absolutely no way bigger companies like that would 1.) be using Discord to conduct this and 2.) paying randoms to do so. There are much easier ways to go about doing this.
They gave all the big subs to corporate overloads well over a decade ago.
The general "tech" subs had mods bought off long ago for general shit
$200 to nuke a topic is nothing to these companies, but an insane amount of motivation to unpaid mods.
It doesn't take long till the motivation from bribes pushes out anyone without that motivation, and that's not even getting into how small the circle of mods really is due to years of "add backs".
Like, at this point we should all accept that real life conspiracies don't have to involve James Bond. It can be a bunch of idiots doing incredibly transparent and ineffective shit.
I had forgotten about Marathon as it's just another multiplayer, live service game in a sea of them...The devs had the wrong priorities in mind when it came to making this game.
I wouldn't even care if they hadn't used the Marathon IP for it. What the fuck was the point of bringing that back for this? It's not like it has name recognition against anyone but like age 35+ folks who happened to play the originals in 1995, or the remakes on XBox Live Arcade, and those people are definitely not the market for a live-service extraction shooter, so what was the point here, other than to irritate people who would have enjoyed a proper boot of the original trilogy?
That is what I am also asking myself...Given that I never played any of the Marathon games in 1995 (being a big RPG fan)...I just don't see the point of rebooting this niche IP and using it as a skin for a live-service extraction shooter; it's utter nonsense and screams of a game studio frothing at the mouth due to desperation caused by a desire to remain relevant. Sony and Bungie fumbled the bag and Marathon is unlikely to enjoy any success given the obscure nature of the IP, and the same tired game format. Given that there are only a few games that enjoyed success with being a live-service extraction game like Hunt: Showdown, Escape from Tarkov, for example...
Bungie should've pivoted into a single-player/shooter/story experience that could be approached at a leisurely pace without any fomo or other garbage that would create unnecessary baggage and friction with players. I would've found that to be more engaging than the game that they crapped out.