Marathon Is Going Free-To-Play, But Not For Long

With a new season starting soon, Bungie is offering Marathon at its best price yet next week: free. For the low price of nothing, anyone interested in checking out the extraction shooter on PC, PS5, or Xbox Series X|S can grab a free trial for the game starting June 2 and running through June 9, with progress carrying over if they decide to drop $40 on it. PS5 players won’t need a PS Plus subscription to go online, either.

With Marathon sales reportedly not being as great as Bungie hoped for and player numbers being modest at best, this might be the best chance for the developer to introduce people to the game. The June 2 date also coincides with the start of Marathon’s second season, which will add the new Night Marsh zone, a new Sentinel Runner shell, and more deadly hardware. The important thing to note is that a new season also means that player inventories are wiped, leveling the playing field.

This means that you won’t have to worry about running into fellow Runners equipped with top-tier loot at the start of the season. Other updates coming in the season include the Cradle, a new system that will let you level up your Runner shell stats without needing to worry too much about faction progression, increased faction progression speed, a larger Vault, and several quality-of-life changes. If you’re curious, Marathon is worth trying out as Bungie has put its own fresh spin on the extraction shooter genre.

“Bungie’s slick extraction shooter is great at creating tense battles, incredible highs, and painful lows, with a future that’s full of promise,” Phil Hornshaw wrote in GameSpot’s Marathon review.

Marathon appears to be Bungie’s main priority for now, as the studio recently announced that Destiny 2 will receive one final content update in June. While the server lights will remain on for the foreseeable future, this update will serve as an epilogue of sorts to the live-service game, just when its story was starting to get good. ‘Significant” layoffs are also expected to follow now that Destiny 2 is being sunset, but Bungie has confirmed that it is also developing several ideas for future games.