Concord is now considered not just an unfortunate release, but one of the biggest failures in video game history, quite literally. Two weeks after release, the game is cancelled and all copies are already being refunded. This came after years of development and tens of millions of dollars chasing a live service shooter trend without making a statement that stands out upon its release.

It’s also part of Sony’s recent push into the live service, where they had a huge success with Helldivers 2 earlier this year, but now suffered that historic failure with Concord. So attention now turns to Sony’s two most important upcoming live games that are left: Bungie’s Marathon and Haven’s Fairgame$.

Scheduled for release in 2025, Marathon will be the product of a major non-Destiny division at Bungie, a studio that made over 200 layoffs in the last year alone and saw rapidly declining player numbers following the release of the expansion concluding the Destiny 2 saga, The Final Shape, even as that game continues to move forward.

Marathon is basically a new IP. It is not Really of course Bungie released the original Marathon in 1994, but the younger generation this shooter is trying to appeal to was probably born 10-15 years later. So yes, it is new, which is a hindrance when a game like, say, Marvel Rivals can come with an established roster of heroes.

Marathon’s development hasn’t been particularly smooth. The first and only trailer was released a year ago in May 2023, along with a video explaining the game that has since been taken offline. Why, you ask? Well, because it featured a major role from Marathon’s former game director Chris Barrett, who, according to Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier, was fired shortly after filming after Bungie investigated complaints about his inappropriate behavior toward women.

Before that reason surfaced in recent weeks, additional reports from IGN’s Rebekah Valentine revealed that Marathon had been taken over by former Valorant director Joe Ziegler following Barrett’s firing. At the time, there were additional reports that Marathon had switched from fully custom characters to heroes, an unusual choice for an extraction shooter and something that set off alarm bells among current Bungie fans.

There simply hasn’t been any meaningful public information about the game since Ziegler was forced to confirm he was directing. He promised more information soon, but none came. Now we’re a few months away from 2025 and have just watched the spontaneous combustion of Concord, another PvP title from Sony. It’s time to talk about it.

But Marathon is at least a Bungie shooter, which is worth something after generations of Halo and a decade of Destiny, which was and is at least an excellent shooter. But Haven’s Fairgame$ seems like an even bigger challenge with higher barriers to success. The well-known Jade Raymond is running Haven, but she’s been shuffled between projects for some time, and a PvPvE heist shooter isn’t exactly the kind of thing she became known for.

Fairgame$ has also been woefully low on information since its announcement, and unlike the Marathon trailer, which has 21 million views and a very positive 91,000 to 4,000 likes to dislikes ratio on YouTube, the Fairgame$ trailer released at the same time has 265,000 views and an underwater record 4,000 to 22,000 ratio. These numbers are pretty close to the response the more recent Concord trailer received, and in short, people liked the look of Marathon, but they didn’t like the look of Fairgame$. This CGI trailer, with no actual gameplay, is the only significant thing we’ve seen of the game so far.

The “look” of Fairgame$ is certainly reminiscent of Payday and The Finals, with the former more or less disappearing as a series now and the latter arriving without much impact on the shooter market. The Finals’ daily peak on Steam is somewhere around 15,000. Fine, but that’s not really part of the discussion. There are recent internal reports that Sony is happy with the development of Fairgame$, but we’ve heard similar things about Concord. But Concord’s problem wasn’t even that it was bad, it was that people weren’t interested. I don’t think people are interested in Fairgame$. Not right now, anyway.

And finally, it says… Fairgame$. I hate to even write this at the end of this article. You might think it’s not important, but it is important and it should change. While I have some confidence that Marathon could be a hit, maybe even a big one, I don’t have that feeling at all about Fairgame$. And I had the exact same feeling about Concord when it was revealed.

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