Bungie 'constantly testing' Marathon to ensure a 'very bold, innovative, deeply-engaging title'

Eager to avoid another Concord situation, Sony says that Marathon is constantly going through rigorous bouts of testing.

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Sony still plans to invest into live service games, but after Concord's costly blunder, Sony has drastically cut its content pipeline to a more manageable size. Among the new hedged bets are Bungie's new extraction shooter Marathon, which recently went through alarming controversy when Bungie was found to have plagiarized art for use in Marathon's promotional images.

Despite the fiasco, Sony is doubling-down on Marathon--the game will be out this fiscal year, after all--and has subject Bungie's live game to a more in-depth and systemic approach to testing. PlayStation boss Hermen Hulst explains that these new processes will help Sony refine its core live games using never-ending flows of player feedback, analytics tools, and other resources.

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Sony's current and future live games will all follow the same path of rigorous testing, which emphasizes focus on engagement, or the way that gamers interact in the experience itself.

Here's what Hulst said at Sony's recent annual business strategy briefing:

Q: What have you learned from your foray into live game services including Concord, and how does this relate to Marathon and the recent alpha test?

Hermen Hulst, Studio Business Group CEO at Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE):

Live service, we really see that as a great opportunity for us, but with this great opportunity there are some unique challenges associated with it. We've talked about that, the success with Helldivers II, we've also faced some challenges with the release of Concord. I think that some really good work went into Concord, some really big effort.

But ultimately that title entered into a hyper-competitive segment of the market. I think that it was insufficiently differentiated in order to resonate with the players.

So we have reviewed our processes in light of this to deeply understand how and why that title failed to meet expectations to ensure that we're not going to make those same mistakes again.

As I said earlier, we've introduced much more rigorous processes for validating, for re-validating our creative, our commercial, our development assumptions and hypotheses. We now do this on a more ongoing basis.

That's the plan that will ensure we're investing in the right opportunities at the right time all while maintaining much more predictable timelines.

For Marathon, it's our goal to release a very bold and very innovative, deeply engaging title. It's going to be the first new Bungie title in over a decade, so we're really excited for that release.

We're monitoring--we're going through the test cycles and we're monitoring the closed alpha cycle that the team has just gone through, we're taking all the lessons learned and we're using all the capabilities that we've built in analytics and user testing to understand how audiences are engaging with the title.

Some of that feedback, frankly, has been varied, but it's super useful and that's why you do this testing.

The constant testing, the constant re-validation of assumptions that we just talked about, to me is just so valuable to iterate and constantly improve the title so when launch comes, we're going to give the title the optimal chance of success.

This cycle of test, iterate, and test again, that is such a key component of the live service success, both leading up to launch but also throughout the life of the game.

We're committed to continuing to leverage our learnings to maximize engagement and player satisfaction throughout the lifecycle of the title.