Marathon Rolls Out Vault Breaker as Bungie's Losses and Layoffs Mount

Bungie is adding a new mode to Marathon today, and it arrives four days after the shooter lost its game director. The mid-season update for Season 2 brings Vault Breaker, a time-limited PvE roguelite that sits apart from Marathon's normal modes rather than flipping them to co-op. It runs for two weeks and closes on 4th August, plays out on the Cryo Archive map, and takes solo players, duos, or trios at any Runner level.

The loop is built for repeat runs. You raid Vaults and cut down UESC enemies; the Vaults stiffen the longer you stay, and the call on when to extract is yours. Power builds between attempts, so a wiped run still feeds the next one. Clear a run and everything you carried, minus event currency and rewards, converts into Vault Data. That currency upgrades a Sponsored Kit, the preset loadout you pick before each run, since player-made loadouts are off the table here. Gear taken into Vault Breaker can't cross into the standard game, so there's no farming the mode for an edge against other players.

The one bridge back is the Vault Breaker Armory, where the same Vault Data buys items for use outside the mode. Kill a UESC Commander mid-run and the game hands over Tier One Vault Data even if you die before extracting, a reward aimed at newer players. Anyone after something meatier waits for the full PvE mode Bungie has slated for Season 3, which it hasn't detailed.

Here's the full Marathon 1.1.5 changelog in patch notes, straight from Bungie.

New content usually signals a studio pushing forward. This one reads more like a studio steadying itself. Game director Joe Ziegler left Bungie on 17th July, three and a half years after joining from a 12-year stint at Riot and about four months after Marathon shipped. Ziegler wrote on X that it was his last day and that he was handing game director duties to Del Chafe III and Julia Nardin. In the same note, he thanked the Marathon community, said the mission would continue, and promised to reveal his next move soon.

"Keep it weird, keep it real."

— Joe Ziegler

The exit landed in the middle of the studio's major layoffs. Last month's cuts hit at least 292 people, most of them on the Destiny 2 team after that game's final update in June, plus an undisclosed number of Marathon developers. Bungie head Justin Truman stepped down in the same window, and the round pushed total departures toward 400, close to half the studio by some counts. Bungie had already dropped 100 jobs in 2023 and another 220 in 2024.

The money underneath this is uglier than the staffing moves suggest. Sony's fiscal year report logged a 120.1 billion yen charge tied to Bungie, a $765 million impairment loss covering both Destiny 2's shortfall and Marathon's launch quarter. Sony booked $200 million of it in Q2 after Destiny 2 missed internal targets and the other $565 million in Q4. Against the $3.6 billion Sony paid for Bungie in 2022, that puts roughly a fifth of the purchase price on the books as lost value inside a single year. The wider company fared better: Sony's operating income rose 12 percent year over year, and it forecasts a 30 percent gain next fiscal year, partly because these charges won't repeat.

Marathon's own figures explain the write-down. Analyst firm Alinea Analytics put sales near 1.2 million copies about two weeks in, worth around $55 million before microtransactions, split as roughly 800,000 on Steam, 217,000 on PS5, and 133,000 on Xbox. That leaves close to 70 percent of buyers on PC, an odd shape for a first-party Sony studio. Daily active users sat at 380,000 in late March, down from 478,000 over launch weekend, and the Steam 24-hour concurrent peak has slipped to 26,913 from 88,337 on launch day and 143,621 during the pre-launch server slam. Reviews weren't the issue: the game holds an 82 on Metacritic for PS5, with GameSpot, IGN, Game Informer, and PC Gamer all scoring it 9 or higher.

What Bungie has left is a small, committed core rather than a broad audience. Steam players average 27.8 hours against 16.5 on PS5 and 17.3 on Xbox, 22 percent of Steam owners have crossed 50 hours, and 7 percent are past 100. Steam user reviews hold at 88 percent positive, and the PlayStation average is 4.54 out of five. Eurogamer's Rick Lane read Marathon as more than a striking coat of paint over a standard extraction shooter, and the playtime spread backs that up. A first discount hasn't turned the trend around.

Bungie's argument is that this core is worth building on. The studio has said it plans to support Marathon for years, and creative director Julia Nardin framed the roadmap as open to player input.

"We know where we want to take the story over the next few years, but I don't want to say it's completely 'locked in.'"

— Julia Nardin

Forbes' Paul Tassi has backed that stance, reporting no planned scale-back and work underway on future seasons, with internal sources rejecting any comparison to Concord's collapse. He still won't call the launch the hit Bungie needed, and with a budget reported between $200 and $250 million, Marathon needs years of paid seasons before it recovers its value on Sony's ledger.

Sony's live-service bet doesn't ride on Marathon alone. The company still has Fairgames, an extraction shooter from Haven Studios that left pre-alpha testers cold, and it already ate the cost of shutting Concord down. If Marathon keeps sliding, Sony may give Bungie more room by slowing its other live-service plans rather than pushing another launch into the same wind.

Marathon has a look nothing else in the extraction genre owns, and I still doubt a distinct identity beats rivals whose players are already dug in. Arc Raiders' Launch last autumn showed how far a fresh idea can carry a game, with Embark's shooter peaking near 466,000 on Steam in January before shedding roughly 80 percent of that crowd by spring, and part of the community now labelling it “fully dead” even as it still charts well. That kind of start didn't buy long-term safety, so I don't trust a hot launch to carry Marathon on its own.

Cliff Bleszinski, the Gears of War creator who says he is weighing a full-time return to game development and may return to game development, summed up the mood around the PvP space in one line.

"Good luck to anyone in that space."

— Cliff Bleszinski

Couldn't put it better, though I'd add a quiet "help, God".

Also, a rumor has Bungie, Sony, 2K, and Gearbox in early talks to remake 2009's original Borderlands as a Destiny-style live-service looter shooter, with an open world and character customization on the table and Borderlands 2 floated as a timed PS6 exclusive, though the claim traces back to a 4chan leak and is worth heavy skepticism.