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The battle of the extraction shooters is on, but developers Bungie and Embark are presenting a united front on social media — even after Marathon temporarily censored Arc Raiders in chat.
After the Marathon Server Slam event went live yesterday (and hit impressive Steam concurrent player numbers), players noticed that Embark’s hugely successful Arc Raiders was censored in chat.
A clip showing Tyler ‘Ninja’ Blevins of Fortnite fame finding this out for himself went viral on social media after Jake Lucky posted it to Twitter / X, below. Other competitive shooters, such as Halo, Counter-Strike, and Apex Legends, were not censored.
ARC Raiders is censored in Marathon’s chat in game LOL pic.twitter.com/W2XUiYfJ3S
— Jake Lucky 🔜 GDC (@JakeSucky) February 26, 2026
This censorship didn’t last long, and Arc Raiders is now allowed in Marathon chat. But the odd situation did spark a wholesome follow-up as the official Marathon account replied to the viral tweet to declare “Arc Raiders is awesome,” in an in-game chat screenshot.
And now, the official Arc Raiders account has replied to Marathon with a similarly loving statement: “No matter if you’re a Runner or a Raider, loot is loot. We’ll save you a seat in the shuttle 🫶”
No matter if you’re a Runner or a Raider, loot is loot.
We’ll save you a seat in the shuttle 🫶— ARC Raiders (@ARCRaidersGame) February 27, 2026
So, all smiles on social media for now. But of course there’s huge pressure on Marathon to do well for Bungie, especially after Destiny 2’s downturn and the significant internal struggles at the legendary studio. In November, Bungie parent company Sony said the studio had failed to meet its sales and user engagement expectations, and recorded a 31.5 billion yen (approx. $204.2 million) impairment charge as a result. That was significant enough to drag down profits at Sony’s Game & Network Services Segment, which includes Sony Interactive Entertainment.
Sony chief financial officer (CFO) Lin Tao said at the time: “Regarding Destiny 2, partially due to the changes in the competitive environment, the level of sales and user engagement have not reached the expectations we had at the time of the acquisition of Bungie. While we will continue to make improvements, we downwardly revised the business projection for the time being, and recorded an impairment loss against a portion of the assets at Bungie.”
A few months before Sony’s financial report, in August last year, Bungie CEO Pete Parsons left the company after 23 years and nearly 10 as CEO. He was succeeded by Justin Truman, previously chief development officer and fellow Bungie veteran. Parsons oversaw Bungie during many turbulent years, first taking over as CEO in 2016 from Harold Ryan and overseeing its break from Activision in 2019. He was at the helm throughout many of the events catalogued in our 2021 report on Bungie’s internal work culture. Just months after our report, Bungie was acquired by Sony for $3.7 billion, ending the studio’s flirtation with independence.
As the acquisition settled in, concerns began to arise about the studio’s future. Destiny 2 was struggling, and Marathon was still years away. Then the layoffs came. In 2023, Bungie laid off roughly 100 individuals and delayed Destiny 2’s The Final Shape DLC, with Parsons taking responsibility for the cuts. Developers told IGN at the time that the atmosphere at Bungie was “soul-crushing” as fears grew of a total Sony takeover of the company. In 2024, this was followed up with even more layoffs, impacting 220 people despite The Final Shape’s success. 155 people were also integrated from Bungie into Sony at this time. In the wake of those layoffs, former workers claimed Bungie misrepresented its finances and had significantly overextended itself when Sony acquired the studio. It was apparently bad enough that at least one source described as a “well-connected former worker” went so far as to claim that Bungie faced dire consequences if the acquisition hadn’t happened, saying that the “alternate history is insolvency.”
Troubles continued to rock the studio through the rest of 2024 and into 2025, with Marathon seeing a delay out of its previous September 2025 release window. Most recently, Sony confirmed Bungie would be integrated into PlayStation Studios so the company could have more control over the developer.
Back in June last year, Sony said it remained committed to live service video games despite high-profile failures such as Concord, and insisted Marathon would be out before April 2026 despite the mixed alpha feedback and damaging accusations of plagiarism against Bungie. Since then Bungie has worked to improve not only Marathon, but the sentiment among gamers around it.
Sony will be keen to avoid another catastrophic launch like Concord, which was pulled offline just two weeks after launch, with one estimate suggesting it sold just 25,000 copies. It has proved a costly failure for Sony, with hundreds of millions of dollars wasted amid the closure of its developer, Firewalk Studios. Bungie now faces concern over its own future, with the pressure on Marathon to deliver. Marathon launches proper across PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X and S next week.
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at [email protected].
