Eric // #Marathon Stan Account

Sunday, June 7 is locked in. Xbox Games Showcase 2026 is almost here with a deep dive into Gears of War: E-Day Direct. In my first month, I heard clearly that our community values Xbox FanFest. As part of the return of Xbox, we made the decision to bring it back to LA to recognize the players who’ve been with us over the years. Looking forward to celebrating together!

The Oscars’ response? AMPAS/Oscar CEO Bill Kramer apparently blocked me on Instagram last night after seeing my post expressing disappointment about the broadcast’s In Memoriam omission of my father. You truly can’t make this stuff up.

I think it does a disservice to the players to ridicule player count watching. We have seen countless examples in the last few years of player count drops leading to game service stops. If you're going to put $40 into a game, you need to believe the game will continue for X amount of years. Asking people for blind faith treats them like sheep. Players are not dumb: they know that Bungie's acquisition was costly, their staff are costly, and that cost/sales requirements are likely substantially higher than ARC Raiders given a large, Seattle-area workforce who needs to cover not just their burn but the equity Sony spent on the acquisition of the studio. So when the game fails to reach ARC numbers, an elementary schooler can do the math showing that the number may be on the wall. It may be a year away. Possibly two! But it also could be sooner. Businesses have to be cut throat; if Sony doesn't see a path to burn rate profitability with Marathon, and has no plan to increase player count in the next six months, they would be smarter to cut their losses. I'm not suggesting they don't, I'm only saying that this is a reasonable, logical train. Warframe has very different cost requirements than Marathon. That doesn't mean Marathon is bad. By all accounts, it is very good. The problem with the industry is that you can spend way too much for a good game that can't make back it's money. This has been Square Enix's issue on Final Fantasy games for years.

When Warframe released we had 435 other titles compete with for the attention of millions of steam users. Now games have 20,014 other games in the same year for many millions of steam users that have already been exposed to 80,000+ prior releases they might have liked.

I have redesigned Marathon's UI! Let me know what you think!