Marathon’s Make-or-Break Season 2 Is Almost Here, This Is When It Begins
Topics: Bungie, PC, PlayStation, Xbox
Featured Image Credit: Bungie
Topics: Bungie, PC, PlayStation, Xbox
Marathon’s season two is nearly here, and it could be make-or-break for the studio that gave us the legendary Halo and Destiny franchises.
To say that it’s been a rough start since Bungie’s revived shooter, Marathon, arrived in March 2026, would be an understatement. Its second season of content begins this week, and if it doesn't hit the ground running, it could be the game's final nail in its proverbial coffin.
Straight off the bat, it not only launched with missing content, adopting the release now, fix later attitude, but much of the community criticised the game for offering nothing compelling to the live-action, extraction shooter formula, an area in which the indie game, ARC Raiders, continues to thrive.
Pretty much since launch, Marathon has been struggling with maintaining its concurrent player base, at least on Steam, though I suspect consoles might not be much better. At the time of writing, according to SteamDB, the concurrent player numbers have dropped by 87% from 88,337 to 11,279.
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Season two of Marathon begins tomorrow on Tuesday, 2 June 2026, at 6pm BST/1pm EDT/10am PDT. The second season of Marathon will bring a new playable Sentinel/Runner, a new map, missions, weapons, a new ranked mode and more.
Marathon season two will also controversially wipe all players' gear, non-premium currency and materials, and season one progression. However, earned and bought cosmetics will remain, codex unlocks, as well as Faction and account level progression. Fans of the Destiny series will be familiar with such wipes.
My gut instinct presses X to doubt, but I could be very wrong. Very few games have managed triumphant comebacks of the magnitude that would be required to save the Bungie extraction shooter. Once a relationship with fans has been broken, a very bleak future often lies ahead.
Bungie is offering a free week of Marathon to celebrate season two, but to garner new success, that offer will not only need to entice thousands of new and returning players, but it will also have to retain them once the free promotion has ended. It probably doesn't help with the fans' crumbling relationship when Sony abandoned not only Destiny 2 support, but also development of Destiny 3.
As a big fan of Bungie since Halo: Combat Evolved in 2001, and someone who was at some point obsessed with Destiny, I am genuinely rooting for the studio to turn things around, but I do fear for its future.
Marathon is out now on PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S.
READ MORE: Destiny Players Turn on Sony, Demand Destiny 3 Development with Petition